Twitter is nothing if not ephemeral, so why – you might ask yourself – basic web interface remained unchanged for so long? And if you were concerned that the microblogging site was getting a little stale rejoice: every one of its 241 million users now has access to a revamped look which overhauls your profile page completely.
It’s more than just a little bit reminiscent of those of both Facebook and Google+ with a large banner image across the top of the profile and a new larger profile picture for users to show off their selfies more prominently. Many of the design cues also seem to have been inherited from Tweetdeck, the client app which is fully owned by Twitter.
The banner image has only grown slightly, to 1500×500 pixels from 1252×626, but it now takes pride of place stretching the full width across the top of the profile with a much larger 400×400 size profile photo sitting below it to the left.
Aside from the image changes, a trio of others come in to effect with the new profiles that allow for more granular control of your own profile as well as when you view others’ as well.
The first new feature, called ‘Best Tweets’ increases the font size of tweets that have receive the most engagement (ie. retweets, favourites and replies) in your timeline thus making what are essentially your best tweet more visible to people arriving on your profile for the first time. The second new feature, allows you to pin a tweet to the top of your profile giving it pride of place among its tweet-brethren and making it less ephemeral in nature, once again an attempt to show off your best work.
Lastly you can now apply filters to tweets on a profile selecting whether you want to see only the user’s original tweets or the user’s tweets as well as their replies to other people’s tweets. There is also an option to show tweets with photos or videos in them which appear in a masonry styled two-column layout to give them more space.
If you haven’t already been offered the new look profile you can head over to Twitter’s website to activate it for yourself.
Or just do as the pros do and use Tweetdeck instead.
[Image – Twitter]
