…or: Things you might not have yet noticed in #NewTwitter.
My primary twitter account was finally affected by Twitter’s rollout of their new interface – codenamed phoenix based on some filenames - yesterday. It seems like the interface already experienced some minor bugfixes in regards to usability since the rollout first started. The tech behind this new frontend has already been covered on their engineering blog.
Frontpage revamped
Besides the obvious design changes the frontpage of twitter suddenly becomes useful, at least for me. A quick overfew on the five latest followers provides a way to quickly decide wheter I want to follow them back or report that rarely dressed girl for spam.
It also features some filtered views on your timeline that shows retweets, mentions and provides quick access to saved searches. I really like that they integrated this set of features, especially because I was never a big fan of the column views that were offered by most desktop clients.
Pictures!
Your feed now contains little pictograms indicating the type of embedded content within some tweets. Pictures and other content from popular sites and media partners are now embedded directly in the view for single tweets – you’ll see these embeds when you click a tweet in your timeline or visit the URI for a single tweet.
Alas, you don’t get these embedded media when you embed single tweets with their tool Blackbirg Pie – which looks a bit antique now – but I assume they’ll change that after finishing the rollout.
Spotlight on: A tweet!
Viewing singular tweets by visiting their permalink gives you the previously mentioned embeds. Click a link in your timeline and you’ll get even more useful meta-information on the tweet as well as the accounts and hashtags it contains.
You’ll see other tweets from the original author, which might give you some context on what he/she wants to say with that funny picture in the tweet. It might also be interesting what that conference hashtag is all about or who else was mentioned in the tweet so you can easily decide if you want to follow those people. All this meta-information adds a whole new dimension of discovery (of topics, people & places) to browsing your timeline.
@reply / mention – It’s in a box!
When you mention a user or reply on a tweet it’s opened in a floating, resizable box which looks like the dialog boxes from jQueryUI. Those function previously redirected the user to the starting page.
Why this is a great change? Because the rest of the interface stays usable. You can browse to another persons profile, a search or any other view within the system to gather information you need to put those nasty 140 characters together. All without changing browser windows or tabs.
@replys? conversations!
The killer feature I see in the new twitter interface is that it finally turns @replys into useful and quickly comprehensible conversations. Clicking a tweet with the little chat-bubble symbol will now show the tweet in question, as well as the tweet it’s replying to.
When clicking an original piece of content, replies are now shown – even if you don’t follow the replying user. (Will we see a new form of reply-spam for influential users now?)
The earth keeps spinning
The old interface didn’t really emphasize location data within the Twitter platform. The new interface has it tightly integrated in singular tweet views and offers tools like “View Tweets at this place”. This makes their whole places database more useful for regular users – although it seems to lack mechanisms to “follow places” like you’d do with lists.
Anything I missed?
This article sure doesn’t cover all new / better integrated features of #NewTwitter – it’s what I find most useful at first glance. Did I miss anything really important? I’d love to hear your opinion. Let me know – here or directly on Twitter.