Twitter has unveiled a redesign of its mobile apps and changes to its main site, which serve the long-term goal of tightening the Twitter ecosystem and strengthening its position in the social media landscape.
One of the key features of the redesign is the new “header photo” for Twitter profiles. The update appears to borrow from some of the features of rival social networking platforms Facebook and Google+, especially with the new focus on images and mobile.
Twitter product manager Sachin Agarwal says the new profiles will help users get to know each other through their pictures. “Photo streams now appear below anyone's most recent Tweets on iPhone, Android and iPad.”
The new mobile version of Twitter for iOS and Android also allows users to add a background photo to their profiles - in addition to the header and profile pictures. According to Twitter product manager Sung Hu Kim, the Twitter for iPad app has also been “rebuilt from the ground up” with a new design and interface.
“Expand tweets with a single touch to see beautiful photos, rich videos and Web page summaries right in your timeline. Dive into the content with another tap to see the photo, play the video or read links from the Web in full-screen mode,” says Hu Kim.
Apple as a mentor
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo provided some insight into the thinking behind the new redesign during an interview with PBS' Charlie Rose, in which he said: “Apple is in many ways a mentor company for us.”
Gaining control over the Twitter user experience was also cited by Costolo as a key priority for the micro-blogging site - which he says now sees itself as a “mobile first” company.
Twitter has been slowly and systematically cutting off third-party clients from its service, and the release of the new mobile apps has also now dropped support for third-party image-upload services such as Twitpic and yFrog. Twitter now forces users to use its own image uploader, which is powered by Photobucket.
Speaking to Buzzfeed, Twitpic founder Noah Everett said of Twitter's decision: "They're trying to control those eyeballs on their apps, they're an ad-based company, they make money that way.” Everett added that the new Twitter policy could be a “big death blow” to smaller companies. Everett is banking the future of Twitpic on the alternative platform it launched last year called Heello.
iPad anger
While most of the changes to the mobile apps are seen as incremental, the new version of the Twitter for iPad app, however, has been met with some sharp criticism from industry commentators, with some saying Twitter has essentially removed all of the “cool” features of the previous design and replaced them with something very generic.
Chief correspondent at Xconomy Wade Roush says the new app has “none of the flair” of its predecessor - which was designed by Tweetie founder Loren Brichter before he left Twitter over a year ago. Roush also tweeted: “New Twitter for iPad is AWFUL. A huge step backward. I wish I could un-update.”
Roush is not alone is his dislike of the new app. Tech commentator John Gruber said in a blog post on the topic: “They threw away Loren Brichter's ground-breaking UI and replaced it with a timeline where you can't tap anything - URLs, usernames, hash tags, images. Instead, you have to tap to 'open' the tweet first. I can't remember the last time I saw a Twitter client in which you couldn't tap URLs from the timeline.”
Developer, writer and UX designer, Dustin Curtis also tweeted: “The new Twitter for iPad is a design disaster. It perfectly showcases the wrong way to pursue cross-platform consistency.”
Roush adds there is an underlying commercial logic to Twitter's new mobile apps - to unify the look and feel of the platform across devices and clear the way for more branded messaging on users' timelines. “But it seems clear that Twitter underestimated its users' affection for the previous design, or it wouldn't have undertaken such a thorough erasure.”
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