Twitter has once again changed their home page. Announced officially on the blog, the changes took place throughout Tuesday for most users. The new page is more dynamic in its presentation, giving a continually evolving list of “Top tweets,” some trending topics, and the ability to hover over most things on the screen to get larger versions or more in-depth information.
Grudgingly, it appears, Twitter is admitting that their service is not just about status updates anymore. It’s a little deeper than that.
In somewhat clunky English, Frederic Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb explains some of the changes and then questions Twitter’s explanation of themselves (which now appears on the front page). It’s obvious that the home page is all about user conversion. Twitter’s biggest problem has been converting new users into regular users and the service enjoys a very high dropout rate. By better explaining how Twitter works and what it’s all about, they obviously hope to retain more of those dropouts.
That analysis seems to bear out as ComputerWorld’s Juan Carlos Perez based an entire piece on considering just that. Like him and Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch, I like the new look of Twitter’s home page. Most regular Twitter users rarely see this page anyway, so gearing it towards newbies is a good idea and something that’s a long time overdue.
In fact, unless you log out, it’s hard to see the new main Twitter page as users are normally redirected to their own main feed screen. A lot of us interact with Twitter through third-party software or devices as well, putting us even further removed from their home page.
So the new improvements are definitely better for new users who, if they stick around, will make for a better community overall. So what’s not to like here?
