The much awaited release of the new face of twitter is here, or at least in its BETA stages. I'm not sure if anyone else has had the little entising message at the top of their page-like I have. 'Psst [check out the new badassness] . . .' with the yellow 'try now' button.
The first thing I thought to myself was that they made a mistake-'Why me? I'm nobody special.' My follower to following ratio isn't anything great. I tweet and blog when I can-mostly boring bafoonary or failed attempts at psuedo-intellectual e-snark.
I know about but can't use a lot of the mobile applicatios that make the ease of microblogging easier.-socio-economically smart tool (phone or apple device) handicaped.
Now that I've gotten my fancey wordery and pretentious prose fix, I'll give a list of the five things that I think work best and worst with the preview of the new twitter that I've been using for the past few days.
5 Up and down (good and bad)
Everything is on One Page:
The most obvious thing about the #NewTwitter that works, is the fact that everything is on one page. Looking at the home page is the same thing as looking at any other page including other peoples profiles; which is another feature in the five that is coming up next. Basically all content on Twitter can be accessed from the home page. The new setup gives normal explorer windows the feel of a mobile application on a desktop. Even though I haven't seen what the #NewTwitter looks like on a mobile device, it may work better or worse.
The extended content Button:
An alert of this new feature pops up when I clicked on the 'try now' button. This new button is in the place where the 'favorite' star used to be. One click puts everything that used to be implied by little notes at the bottom of tweets-'tweeted from tweetdeck,' or 'the theatre disrict.'
After pressing the little circle with the right facing arrow in it, another feed appears next to the normal feed with more specified content. Supposedly video is going to be available, but all I've seen is geo-location information and twitpix. If streaming video could be embedded like other sites, it would be awesomer. I haven't tried tweeting complicated stuff through the new interface yet, so I can't speak from experience when it comes to that.
Everything about the #NewTwitter seems to be an effort to make everything simpler at a glance.
The New Sleek Look:
Even if your background sucks or the templete your using limits your individual expression, the new look of twitter will make your site look cooler by proxy.
Tweets are more self contained. Most of the actions that come along with the conversationality of twitter-retweets, replys, and favoriting; are at the bottom of tweets in your feed. Not a big change.
Retweeting is easier:
Not that the advent of the 'retweet' button didn't make retweeting easey enough, I was always bothered that it wasn't present in listed tweets. In order to retweet someone you had to do it from your main feed or old school RT and retype.
Using lists makes it easier to follow other peoples' tweets without following them and/or organize the people you follow so it's easier to filter out some of the noise from followbacks and more avid tweeters that clog up feeds sometimes.
The shining Blue light:
Last and not that big a deal, is the little blue light that shines the way back 'home.' It's not that noticeable; only on the 'home' button and I had to make something number five for anyone that actually read/skimmed this far.
. . . the preview is a bit buggy and it chuggs whether I look at it on a Mac or PC; but, the moves forward seem like some really good ideas to make twitter more user friendly for people that aren't as familiar with the culture that comes with it.
