Twitter Redesigns Around Four Concepts: Home Timeline, Connect, Discover, Me

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/08/twitter-resigns-around-four-concepts-home-timeline-connect-discover-me-letsfly/

by sahillavingia • 15 years ago

90 44 15 years ago

raganwald• 15 years ago

    Twitter redesigns
              ^^

rsoto• 15 years ago

Judging from the URL, it seems like TC's mistake, altough OP just posted it as it is.

thwarted2• 15 years ago

I count five items, not four, in that headline.

dmbass• 15 years ago

1. Home Timeline

2. Connect

3. Discover

4. Me

thwarted2• 15 years ago

I guess I missed a comma when viewing on my mobile device.

ashamedlion• 15 years ago

I absolutely love updates, but the new iPhone app feels like a big F U to power users. They're de-emphasizing direct messages by putting them a level down in the "Me" tab and switching accounts if you have multiple is found in the same place.

Also, not a fan of the wasted space on the sides of the tweet feed. However, the new web design looks great.

shinratdr2• 15 years ago

De-emphasizing direct messages makes sense. Twitter is accepting its role as a mostly passive service. Having a conversation through DM requires both parties to be following each other, a frankly rare scenario when most people are following companies, organizations and celebrities or notables. You may not like it but if you make any real use of direct messages, I'm pretty sure you are an atypical user now.

In most situations, people use Timeline mentions to achieve the same thing, but without the secrecy and limitations direct messages introduce. I don't have a problem with this at all, frankly. It leaves a big opening for 3rd party clients to fill the gap, while repositioning the Twitter for iPhone app as the best choice for the mainstream Twitter user (which it wasn't previously but is as of 4.0).

It may not be in your best interests, but I think it's a smart move that's in the long term interests of the service. Twitter, from the beginning, has always been about learning from the community and observing how people use the service rather than telling them how to use the service. This is just one more lesson learned from actual users.

The rest of the UI changes are quite painful, though. I support the previously discussed changes, but overall the 4.0 update is a regression in terms of the UI.

EDIT - I write all that, then I see this in my timeline: "Twitter for iPhone pro-tip: swipe up on Me for DMs and swipe left on Me to switch accounts." I guess they found a compromise. Actually, that's pretty amazing. Nobody else has to think about DMs if they don't want to, but power users still get instant access. Great job, Twitter.

BSeward• 15 years ago

"Twitter for iPhone pro-tip: swipe up on Me for DMs and swipe left on Me to switch accounts." /via https://mobile.twitter.com/bhaggs/status/144846707925061632

Not the most discoverable gesture, but it's there, though it's only a little weirder than "swipe across tweet for secondary actions" (though on that topic I'll miss using that to quickly save links to Instapaper).

bmuon• 15 years ago

I wouldn't expect the "official" apps to be power user friendly. TweetDeck will remain the app for the PU.

sabret00the2• 15 years ago

Have you seen what they've done to Tweetdeck? They've dumbed it down and made it incredibly difficult for PUs. I suspect we'll finally see an open source alternative pop up.

flyosity2• 15 years ago

The switch to a grouped tableview is one of the worst UI decisions I've seen Twitter make. Mobile screens are small so wasting horizontal space is a cardinal sin. Padding on either side of tweets might look good at first glance but it makes the whole interface feel cramped, and allows for fewer tweets to be shown per screen. That, coupled with the removal of text size options makes the information density much lower than it was before, which increases how many times I have to swipe to read tweets, which sucks.

hrabago• 15 years ago

Twitter has become like GMail for me - I access the service but not the application. I've been using the Mail app on the iPhone to access all my GMail accounts, and use Tweetbot for Twitter. The services keep tweaking their own UI's, but as long as they don't block the functionalities that 3rd party apps need, I think I'll be fine.

Qz• 15 years ago

...but as long as they don't block the functionalities that 3rd party apps need...

Not a safe bet by any means.

wgx• 15 years ago

Same here - plus "Twitter for Mac" on OS X. I can't remember the last time I went to twitter.com, it's very rare anyway.

tomkarlo2• 15 years ago

If you swipe left on the "Me" button at the bottom of the iPhone app, it brings up an account selection screen. That seems like a mind-boggling UI decision to me - a swipeable button with no affordance for the swipe and no indication of why it reacted differently to a swipe than a press.

Update: apparently if you swipe up, it shows you DMs. So once you touch that button, you're probably going to some screen, even if you don't want to.

I can imagine the product meeting now: "You're getting rid of the DM icon?" "Yeah, but we'll figure out a way users can get to it directly."

king_magic• 15 years ago

I almost didn't believe you about swipe-left-on-Me. I... just don't understand. What could have possibly made them think that was a good idea? I would have never figured that out in a million years.

Yes, it's true that under "Me" is a "Switch Accounts" button that does the exact same thing, and that's fine, but the idea of implementing swipe-left-on-Me seems to go completely against Apple's HIG and the entire notion of intuitively discovering functionality.

lukeholder• 15 years ago

I honestly believe it is a marketing technique. Look at the number of tweets announcing the secret 'pro-tip' it something that pro twitter users can use and feel special (because they use DM /swipe up/ and have multiple accounts. The rest of the users aren't hardcore and dont care about getting to those things in 2 taps.

Hrothgar152• 15 years ago

You can swipe left from Me across the tab bar which flips the view over. Makes perfect sense if you think about it.

gojomo• 15 years ago

Like the changes conceptually; the unified 'Connect' timeline has already highlighted to me retweets I'd have otherwise misssed.

Hate the new iPhone font/margin choices. Text seems smaller, fainter with no setting to enlarge. New gray margins noticeably waste precious space that could be communication.

fedxc• 15 years ago

Paul Haddad (Tweetbot dev) should be thanking Twitter.

shinratdr2• 15 years ago

If you check his timeline, you'll notice that he did.

venturebros2• 15 years ago

How do I get access to the new web version? On the twitter site is says to download the new app which I did so now how do I get the new web version?

garethsprice• 15 years ago

Open the app and log in, it seems to set some kind of flag on your account. Then after a refresh on the desktop, the new client appears.

Interesting technique, are they trying to drive downloads of the mobile client or are they using "people who can/will download the latest mobile client" as a proxy to select power users to test the new interface on?

venturebros2• 15 years ago

Got it finally! It took about an hour just refreshed again and it is there.

I am not a power user. Perhaps they found that more people tweet from mobile devices that is why they doing it this way?

ry0ohki2• 15 years ago

Surprised it still doesn't have hyperlinks (and Twitter handles mentioned) clickable from the Timeline. Echofon has done this forever, and the Twitter desktop client does it.

flyosity2• 15 years ago

It's more computationally expensive to calculate, draw and attach tap events to rows in a UITableView if you're trying to still keep 60fps scrolling. It's hard enough to get glass-like scrolling with dynamically-loading avatars and random strings of text at different font sizes all over, but tappable things and highlighting makes it even harder.

ry0ohki2• 15 years ago

Echofon does it somehow? I'd rather have form over function, but I'm probably in the minority.

BigZaphod• 15 years ago

Twitterrific has done this for a long time. It was hard to make it perform well, but not impossible.

Zev• 15 years ago

Um. What? While, yes, it is more expensive to detect that something is a link than not, it isn't that expensive to do. Neither is drawing an attributed string with Core Text. Yes, its hard. No, it isn't nearly as hard as you're making it out to be.

And making things tappable/highlightable? The tableview isn't scrolling when you're tapping. Detecting a tap and performing some calculations to determine which text run the tap falls on cannot cause scrolling performance to go down.

kristofferR2• 15 years ago

I think it's time for Twitter to move away from the strict 140 letter limit. It has served them well, but not anymore. Now it's just severely restricting the usefulness of the service and if they don't fix it soon Google+ will grab a lot of Twitter-users who are limited by the limit, like myself.

I don't have the time or enough things I'd like to say in order for it to warrant getting a blog, but not everything I'd like to say fits into 140 characthers either.

It would actually relatively easy for Twitter to fix this issue. Just do it like Reddit does for self-posts. Simply enable people to embed text the same way it lets people embed pictures and videos.

It solves all the major issues Twitter is having - people will stop shortening their tweets so much that they lose their intended meaning/readablity, Google+ stops having a major content advantage due to no characther limit and the feed won't get cluttered by walls of text (unlike Google+).

macrael2• 15 years ago

Maaaybe this would work, but it would have to be significantly different to post long text than to post the regular 140 characters. What makes twitter great is the feed is easy to get through because everyone is limited in what they can add to it. I like that every tweet is essentially the same size. Simply lifting the limit on the regular tweet would be a grave mistake. Them becoming essentially a static blog hosting provider that you can link to in a tweet seems like not a terrible idea, though.

msbarnett2• 15 years ago

I really disagree. The forced constraints of Twitter are its greatest virtue.

I can follow 200+ people only because I know that they'll be forced to be concise in what they say and how they say it. Google+ felt unwieldily at a half-dozen people because at some point each of them would succumb to the temptation to write a 1600+ word post, and no matter how interesting I found them, it turned the act of surveying my timeline from a nearly effortless, quick glance experience into a depressing exercise in reminding myself that there were endless reams of text I was falling behind on and could never hope to find the time to catch up with.

I have the same problem with RSS readers; beyond some very low limit, it becomes dispiriting to see how much stuff I will never find the time to keep up with, so I stop using the app. Twitter doesn't have this effect on me precisely because it forces everyone to be brief and digestible.

A "New Twitter" in which I have to curate my timeline down from 200 to 6 is a Twitter I just stop using.

kristofferR2• 15 years ago

No offense, but did you actually read my post? Since I mentioned the exact same issue and presented a solution I guess you didn't.

As I said - clutter in the timeline wouldn't be an issue like it is on Google+, since the extra "embedded text" would be hidden by default, just like on Reddit.

k-mcgrady• 15 years ago

What about SMS users? The 140 character limitation is there for them. It would fragment the service for them as they would only be able to receive short tweets or receive tweets split into multiple messages.

JCB_K• 15 years ago

Whereas I'm not saying they should remove the limitation, I think that should be the last of Twitter's concerns. Not sure if there's any official numbers on this, but I'd guess the percentage of tweets sent by SMS is not much more than 3 or 4%. It's what made Twitter big, but texting tweets is legacy now.

nickheer• 15 years ago

> It solves all the major issues Twitter is having - people will stop shortening their tweets so much that they lose their intended meaning/readablity

I disagree that this is a problem. The content of a tweet should be a short communication, not a diatribe. I think that's the non-SMS-based reason for the 140 character limit. It forces people to think about what is important for such a small space.

I like your idea of embedding text extension into a tweet, but I think this would be abused to the point where Twitter would turn into something more akin to Tumblr. This meshes well with your point about having more to say than fits in 140 characters, but less than an actual blog. Tumblr is more of an elastic-use platform, whereby one can post Twitter-length messages, a few paragraphs, or an essay. I don't think Twitter intends to compete in that market. Length isn't their goal, but succinct is.

blader• 15 years ago

I agree with this. I'm now based in Beijing and the local Twitter clones (the largest with hundreds of millions of users on Weibo.com) have a 140 character limit, but in Chinese. Each Chinese character has roughly the same expressiveness as a full word in English, and it's a much richer experience. Changing the limit to something like 100 words would be a welcome change IMO.

gaving• 15 years ago

Fairly skeptical initially, but liking the changes so far. Web interface seems a lot more stable and fiddly too.

You'll pry my tweet bot from my cold, dead hands though.

sabret00the2• 15 years ago

Normally I don't give too much stock to redesigns of any particular service when there are clients that do the job much better. But seeing as they've destroyed Tweetdeck, once the new design reaches me, I'll probably give it a go before finding another service. At that point, I'll probably move towards something like Tumblr for my mundane chat designed to break up my working day.

Twitter Redesigns Around Four Concepts: Home Timeline, Connect, Discover, Me

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