Twitter; A 24x7x365 running social party where everyone is invited and approachable in most warm way as wasn’t even imaginable in any of the social services before. If even now, some thought that its just another social site or something too messy to deal with or think what just 140 characters do, then new twitter has arrived to spice up the party even more.
A simple idea in the start, twitter sooner became the biggest phenomenon of the planet where people even started missing twitter most, when in space. More than the simplest look of the Twitter, it was the services that kept joining in and made twitter such an engaging place. There been apps like Gravity and Tweetie running around Twitter services that made tweeting much more fun and given another mean to it.
While Gravity and Tweetie like twitter clients were writing another language of navigation, there was becoming a bigger gap between what various twitter client offering and what was available with the origin itself, the web interface of Twitter. Finally the big announcement came at night of September 14, 2010, when twitter decided to fill up this gap and announced an all new interface for twitter integrating many services revolving around twitter.
GigaOM mentioned an interesting comment on it..
The code name for the new launch was Phoenix (Kind of funny when you think of the metaphorical bird rising from the ashes. As long as in this metaphor the ashes are the fail whale.
Rolling out of the services was started since the same night, but considering the gigantic volume of users, the process was to go through phases only and it was only yesterday, when it reached to me and after spending sometime with it, here I am bringing some of its bit for you.
I will not bring the technical details like how JavaScript was used to implement most of the part and how many services get unified to bring this experience look like what it seems right now. Just bring you what a Layman see.
Twitter pointed down the changes under four categories…
1. New Design First it came the blue ribbon on the top to indicate that a new experience is just a click away
Just a click and something richer and very pleasant appears
You zoom in and the first message appear that your twitter web experience gonna be having previews of pictures and videos as well means no reasons to go behind those links of twitpic, youtube etc.
While the left side contains the basics related to you and also the trending topic at a much better place. It was also a pleasure to see followers and following list at equal levels.
On the other side, when we take a look at timeline, then even if it managed to retain the old and cleaner look that has made twitter this much success so far, there are many significant changes to improvise the user experience drastically.
We have the search bar at top like we seen it in Facebook and tweet & location buttons appear only when we type something in the update box.
Interesting was to see how things are adopting touch screens now, few days back I seen the new IRCTC website looks and now this… you click at any place of a tweet or click at the details button at the left top of the tweet, we see the left half of the screen getting converted into conversation mode.
I was wondering for sometime that what that message type of icon for, till I came to see that it changes the shape according to the content. Check in above screenshot that how it changes shape for Geotag and pictures. Cool!!
Not only this, but the idea of Mini Profile at the left side of the page was equally cool as most of the things getting constrained at one single page only rather than going though various pages.
Not only this, but the basic operations like reply or retweet took transparent Pop-Up format. Before thinking that an annoyance, think once that now you wont be needed to go through all over to the top text box and then coming back to find that where you were… when you are providing the infinite scroll, then it was impossible to manage without that.
And by the way, there is always a small icon on the top to bring the update screen anytime you want to update something, without disturbing where you are in the timeline. That’s called something streamlined and tight.
View Photos, Videos and other media content Started with the information sharing, twitter has became the biggest tool for sharing pictures and videos than any other service of the world. It always seems tasteless to see only links around when someone shares a video or pics, but on the other hand, it was bound to be messy, if they would have gone for putting inline richer contents.
The magical left panel came out to be solution of all ..
Though available for partner services like DailyBooth, DeviantART, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, USTREAM, Vimeo, yfrog, and YouTube only, but these names are also the biggest names.
Also it was interesting to notice that if you are not following the person, then you get something like the following
Nothing was more delightful to watch youtube videos with all features without leaving the twitter homepage ..
Sure such a streamlined interface gonna make twitter users stay more on twitter rather than spending half of the time in navigating links going outside to twitter and so will facilitate twitter to bring more focus on ads in. Hope the luring side of ads will not take down otherwise superb clean interface as of now.
I think I still can manage to find one suggestion for twitter team that they still not dealing well with the links. May be the works is under progress in background, but it sure makes sense if Twitter also could bring the snipset of links as LinkedIn started doing through link share by this year.
Mini Profiles As I mentioned earlier, idea of Mini profile was cool and sure focused again on the same goal to keep the user on the same page for as much possible, so that whole experience may not go out side the site itself.
You just click over name of someone and in place of opening a new page or refreshing the page to remove your timeline to bring his/ her profile page, you get just a mini profile with sufficient information on the magical left panel.
Cool!!! Isn’t it?
Discover related content We have already seen in earlier screenshots that the conversation mode is much richer in the details. It not only brings the replies in the same chain, but also bring other tweets of the same user, which makes much more sense in giving you a proper view of entire conversation.
And you don’t need to click anything to get location of someone’s geotag info or to know who he is
Definitely, great innovation so far.
What seems to be missing now
Even after trying hard, till now I have not been able to find links to show that a tweet came from which twitter client. Is Twitter all out to kill others? Openly?
Not only this, but uploading pictures or videos still has not made its way to twitter, when its becoming like essential part of all kind of desktop clients. May be for sake of simplicity only, but that’s something, which has to be here today or tomorrow.
At first look, I felt the mobile edition of the site got some changes also, but I guess I am wrong as things are just same as earlier with m.twitter.com
So, this was my little bit, which I got know after using the platform for day one, what you got till now, tell me back for sure….
Nitish Kumar 
Nitish Kumar's Blog 