New Twitter

Over the past few years the homepage of Twitter has undergone a few redesigns but the twitter profiles and user login areas have gone untouched, only changing based on the users choice of background and colour scheme. Now Twitter is not only redesigning these areas but also adding a wealth of new features to enhance the user experience.

So far I can only see what Twitter has shown of the new interface as my account isn’t one of the lucky ones yet but given what I can see of the new design I see a couple of issues…

Infinite Scroll

To be honest infinitive scroll isn’t really my issue, it’s actually better than the ‘More’ button that old Twitter has. My problem is the breaking of the paging. I’ve on occasion wanted to search for a tweet that’s a few days/weeks old and I have no idea who it came from or when. Previously you could play with the url of the page adding in larger numbers to jump through a greater number of tweets, this can’t be done anymore and instead you have to manually scroll through possibly hundreds of tweets. An alternative could be the Twitter search, but for anything over a few days old it’s no good and there still isn’t a way of searching within your own tweets (possibly this might be something new Twitter has).

This inability to review old tweets makes it rather important that should you see anything you remotely might want in the future you must either favourite it or bookmark it in some other way. Really I’d just like Twitter to focus on their search a little more.

Design

In the past we’ve been able to customise the design and backgrounds of our Twitter profile, I’m not sure if new Twitter will still allow us to do this. Looking at the screenshots I get the feeling this feature might be going, yet there is no indication of what the profile will look like when you are not logged in. Unfortunately the preview of new twitter doesn’t show very much.

However what it does show is a clear increase in size for the new twitter, taking advantage of ever increasing screen sizes. If we assume that the profiles will jump to the same size then this means many people’s background images will break. In the past we’ve used Twitter’s smaller size to our advantage by adding content in the free space that a good percentage of users might see. Now the amount of free space is reduced the percentage of users that might see our backgrounds as we intended will also drop.

But who cares?

But really none of this matters so much to me. The one aspect of Twitter that has made it something I use frankly way too much is the API. Due to there being an API I can see tweets as they arrive using a Firefox Add-on or an iPhone app. In truth I rarely use the Twitter website to read or send tweets, I use it only for a small percentage of things, such as to follow someone or view where I’m listed. So although this is a nice step forward in design (even if it breaks user customisation) I doubt I’ll see it so often anyway.