

Twitter announces profile page changes  - virtica
http://digitallife.today.com/_news/2012/09/18/13927467-twitter-profiles-get-a-makeover?lite

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asg
I think its a significant statement that changes to Twitter's look is being
announced on the today programme, as opposed to Techchrunch or similar.
Twitter is now well and truly used by the general population, and looking at
its strategy from a tech or Silicon Valley coloured glasses wont work.

Look at it either way: its jumped the shark, or jumped (crossed) the chasm.
But jumped it surely has.

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atlbeer
I'm curious as to what Twitter's direction with these changes are

The old style, which I prefer and find very functional, focuses on the content
(the individual tweets)

The new style, focuses on the profile of the author itself, and not their
content. Very Facebook-esque direction to focus of the persona instead of the
Tweet.

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yock
It's simple, really. Most of the time, when I click through to a user, I'm
looking to see _who they are_. This is likely due to a retweet in my timeline
and I'm looking to see how I might be associated with this person. Far less
frequently do I click through to see their other tweets.

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jonknee
The new iPad app is atrocious. I thought I somehow accidentally got the phone
version somehow because it appeared so jumbled. It's better in portrait, but I
normally use landscape and there is an incredible amount of unused space. I
still haven't figured out how to switch to my other Twitter accounts, I just
see one. The web view is now full screen so I can't read tweets and have a
link open at the same time (handy with breaking news to read the story and
then reactions).

tl;dr seems like a huge step back

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srj55
Agree. I also use the iPad in landscape and this app is definitely a big step
back.

So much wasted/unused space.

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jonknee
It's like they didn't consider landscape at all. Rotating simply adds margins
to the side of the main UITableView. Baffling. But after they made a power
play to ensure they don't have competition in the Twitter app space, it's
infuriating.

In a very short time they have taken out 3rd party apps and made their own
worse (for no apparent gain on their end, the new app doesn't appear to have
more ads or anything).

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f055
It looks good and should work well for businesses. Clearly Facebook inspired,
but that's not a bad thing. Also, Twitter was the only major network without
cover images (although they had background images).

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timjahn
I think these changes make it pretty clear why Twitter needs to control 100%
of the way their content is displayed and why they're killing off any apps
that won't do that.

I can't help but think this is also a blatant attempt to copy some essence of
Facebook's recent Timeline design.

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debacle
Seems like change for the sake of change and a huge waste of mobile real
estate.

Feels very 'Facebook timeline'-y to me.

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criswell
I think this is a big waste of space if you're already following someone, what
they're talking about should be the primary focus. I wonder if they'll start
with the view scrolled down a bit how cover photos on Facebook do.

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Karunamon
The normal response to this would be "You get an app if you're more interested
in the content", but then I realized that Twitter is going out of their way to
kill off apps.

Somewhat distressing.

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smokinjoe
Don't get carried away, if they truly wanted to absolutely kill off apps,
they'd just close their API.

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Karunamon
Seems like a gradual winding down to me. First a bunch of onerous and (frankly
utterly fucktarded) UI restrictions which completely limit the utility of any
multi-social-network clients (this was the one that really grinds my gears),
then the hard cap on the number of users that any one API user can have..
what's next?

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mikerastiello
I think the new design: <https://twitter.com/twitter> is pretty ugly and puts
the author's bio and URL in an odd place. The banner image will interfere with
that text and make it difficult to read.

I'm curious why they didn't roll out this layout to everyone:
<https://twitter.com/yankees> It's much cleaner.

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RossM
I could previously see 6/7 of the account's previous tweets (on a more-
standard resolution than most devs are used to),, now I see 3. All for a blue-
ish box.

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kylelibra
The increased emphasis on photo sharing is interesting. Facebook bought
Instagram a few months back. Just the other day Google announced the
acquisition of Snapseed. Now Twitter is making changes to make photo sharing
more relevant to the experience.

It seems like photo sharing is strategically important to each of these
companies. Anyone have any insights as to why?

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twoodfin
Photo sharing is the top reason people use social networks. I don't think
there's a close second.

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Silhouette
I suspect being able to send a message to a friend without having to
remember/maintain phone numbers or e-mail addresses is also a key feature for
social networks. It provides a reliable way of finding someone, and it means
people can maintain their own real-life contact details in one place and have
everyone else's records update automatically and accurately.

But yes, sharing photos is surely one of the most important applications for
such a platform. People like to keep in touch, and in the age of cameraphones
and high speed Internet connections, a picture often is worth 1,000 words.

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MatthewPhillips
Looks like the App.net profile page.

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gjulianm
But the App.Net profile page actually shows the interesting information. I've
never found that banner as intrusive as it's now the Twitter one.

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webwanderings
I don't work in TV business, I hope they won't be serving me this new profile
page.

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d70
At least, give me a multi-column timeline instead of one at 522px fixed width.

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decklin
This needs to be covered by <http://pizzaornot.com/>.

