Twitter announced a refresh of their website tonight, with a number of new features combining with a complete visual re-design aimed at making our twitter streams burst with rich content making us spend even more time on the site. The new website will be deployed in a staggered rollout over the next few weeks, and in advance of getting the new site I’ve listed a few features I’d love to see (and a few I wouldn’t!)
The basics:
One of twitter.com’s best features is its simplicity, but there are a few rudimentary tools missing from the main website, the absence of which causes some (myself included) to use third party twitter clients. “Reply all” to participate in conversations, traditional (RT @) retweets allowing edits before retweeting, link shortening directly from the site, media uploading. It appears a large number of these will be included, and that’s a good thing.
Last position:
Twitter now have their own mobile apps/clients and a web interface. If these could all remember where you’re up to in your twitter stream, syncing together with a filter that shows you only unread tweets since your last log on from whichever platform you’re using (like some other 3rd party clients do), that’d be REALLY helpful.
Advertising:
Twitter has started to hire a number of advertising sales and business development staff recently, hinting at moves to increase revenue from advertising, whilst eagle eyed users will have noted promoted tweets in the trending column. All well and good as long as they remain unobtrusive. The new design offers a lot more screen real estate for twitter to sell to advertisers. Whether they do remains to be seen.
The #fail whale:
twitter.com goes down. Often. At these times we get the infamous twitter whale telling us the site is overcapacity as the twittersphere’s inhabitants feel their blood pressure and stress levels rise at an inability to tweet. One can only hope twitter have addressed these issues that will only be compounded by a website with increased complexity and bandwidth requirements. Of course, they could always put the 3% of their servers that currently handle Justin Bieber related traffic to better use, but that’s just my opinion obviously!
In the meantime, has anyone out there got access to the new site? Or are you, like me, waiting and wondering what’s in store. Drop a comment below of what you would (or wouldn’t) like to see on the new site, and let’s compare what we get with what we hope we get!
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