Twitter has started rolling out a new, rich and enhanced interface of their site, earlier today. The new site combines many new features in a bundle to make it a mega event. If there were something you have missed in Twitter for a long time now, the chance is, the list will probably become shorter.
It is a fact that in Twitter lots of people share images and videos and which appear simply as URLs. These used to make us move away from Twitter to take a look at the media, which is something Twitter CEO Evan Williams didn’t like a bit. So he took a step forward and announced the media embedding ability of Twitter, which currently supports 16 of the most used media sharing sites (including TwitPic, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and others). That’s not all, such embedded media will be readily accessible from within the Twitter page, without making the interface clumsy.
For the sake of seamless browsing, all the @-replies, re-tweets, geolocation data, embedded media, etc. will open up in a right pane, rather than opening a new tab. So the main timeline will bu untouched, and can be browsed simultaneously. Even viewing a tweeter’s profile will now open a mini-profile view in the same page, with trivial details to keep you from clicking on the ‘view full profile’ link most of the times. These features are sure to diminish page load time (and saving some unnecessary server request) while viewing someone’s tweet and replying, coming back to the homepage. As Twitter promises more uptime with the new site, this must be one good reason for that. Overall it seems Twitter is starting to behave more like an application.
In case you have been given the grace of #NewTwitter already, but finding it a trouble to get used to, you can opt out of using it and go back to playing the old-twitter interface. If you don’t see the changes in your profile just yet, Twitter probably knows you love your profile too much and giving you some extra time to spend with the legacy interface. Although, over the course of next few days, all tweeters will be upgraded to the new interface.
By the way, you can find us in Twitter to follow or say hello to @DigitIndia.