A Little More About the New Twitter

Changes to social networking sites can be very fascinating both from a consumer and a business perspective.

The recent series of changes on Twitter are no different. The new layout of the Twitter profile is the one major change. With bigger elements and a header image similar to Facebook and Google Plus, did we actually get the feel that the platform is trying to imitate the two? The feeling became stronger when we saw the handles, descriptions and links got pushed to the left (again very similar to Facebook).

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Remember, Facebook too had implemented the trends feature sometime back.  The new Twitter adds ‘Best Tweets’, ‘Pinned Tweets’ and ‘Filtered Tweets’ to its kitty. The tweets with more engagement will be larger in size and are called ‘Best Tweets’, the ‘Pinned’ ones being the ones you can pin to top.  Use ‘Filtered Tweets’ to view selected timelines on other profiles like tweets with photos, videos and replies. All said and done, the new look and updates do look impressive.

Well, this was certainly not enough for Twitter and it went further and added photo tags for Android and iPhone users. Twitter now allows you to tag up to 10 people in the photos you upload on Twitter through your smart phones. Moreover, you can now upload 4 photos in one go.

The next update on Twitter is even more interesting and strikingly similar to what Facebook does. Twitter has added real time notifications to keep you posted on the latest retweets, favourites and DMs that you have received. Now that’s not all, the platform has gone on to make these notifications interactive, so you can reply, retweet and follow from these notifications! Atleast here, we must say that Twitter scored over Facebook if we consider the convenience aspect of this update.

Let’s look at some of the other changes that Twitter did a little earlier. Twitter added photos to DMs. You must have, at some point or the other used Facebook messages to send images to your friends. Now you can do it on Twitter as well. The platform also added search filters on mobile, letting you perform specific searches like photos, videos, news and people.

Did these changes come in the wake of a slower growing Twitter? If we look at the numbers, Twitter got only 9 million additional users in the last quarter of 2013. Twitter had reported a loss of $8.7 million a year ago while the figure went to $511 million this year.

The recent updates and changes may have been a result of the platform losing sheen with its users. It does seem like the micro-blogging platform is working hard to lure users by giving them more features and a better experience. There may be a lot more scope for innovation though and we shall certainly wait for more such updates.