As of yesterday, the Twitter egg will no longer be representative of anyone without a profile picture on their account.

The reason for this is that the social network has introduced a new icon in an effort to clean up its look and take on trolls.

The Twitter egg has been around for seven years and is one of the first few markers of a new account, after a username and handle. For Twitter, it has been a playful way to reference how eggs hatch into birds that send all the tweets you see on the service.

Prior to that, was an, the old Twitter bird, an odd-looking emoji face and a man walking while holding a briefcase and umbrella.

For the new default profile picture, Twitter has adopted a variety gender-neutral and non-descriptive pictures to promote inclusivity, given that users aren’t required to state their gender on the service.

“We chose greys because they feel temporary, generic, and universal. With that, we included a higher contrast colour combination to make this image accessible for those with visual impairments. Because of its colouring, the new profile photo also gives less prominence to accounts with a default profile photo,” Twitter said.

The company outlined the following reasons why it was doing away with the egg icon:

• Last year we refreshed our brand, with a new look and feel highlighting the diversity and expressiveness of the people around the world who make up the Twitter community, in all its colour and vibrancy. As part of our work to bring these ideas into the product, we realised it was time to change the default profile photo, to help prompt more self-expression.

• We noticed that some people kept the egg default profile photo because they thought it was fun and cute, but we want people to use this space to show us who they are! The new default image feels more like an empty state or placeholder, and we hope it encourages people to upload images that express themselves.

• We’ve noticed patterns of behaviour with accounts that are created only to harass others – often they don’t take the time to personalise their accounts. This has created an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behaviour, which isn’t fair to people who are still new to Twitter and haven’t yet personalised their profile photo.

Twitter said it hopes this new default profile photo encourages more people to express themselves on the social network.

[Source – Twitter blog]