I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. I love the concept and use the service multiple times a day. I hate the fact that the core web app is so feature deficient. Compared to the hole filling third party Twitter apps and clients, Twitter on the web is pretty depressing. I use Twitter for consuming news, communicating with people and watching trends 24×7 using various iPhone apps, Hootsuite and up until this review I’ve not bothered to login to the web app.
Without third party apps, Twitter could not have become the phenomenon it is today. The usually nonchalant Twitter team finally rolled out a bunch changes to the bland web app last week amidst much hype. So is the new Twitter going to bring users back to the web app?
The short is answer is “No.” To know why, follow me after the fold.
The Big Changes
Taking a leaf from thirty apps, the Twitter stream now has clearly segmented tabs for tweets, mentions, Retweets etc.
Welcome Screen
Twitter’s new design is pushing users to search more with a prominently placed search box. In the older design the search box was inconspicuously placed at the lower end of the right side column.
Search Results
Search results have gotten more comprehensive and take another leaf out of popular third party apps to display tweets near your location (you will have to enable your location for this one). The second column of the results page is dedicated to People and Trends. While the presentation is great, for most of search terms we have two thirds of the right column empty.
Conversation View
Conversation View
The thing I like most in this refresh is the conversation view. You don’t have to click on the tiny link on the bottom of the every single tweet to catch up and understand what people are talking about in the first place. Again, this idea has been lifted from popular Twitter clients, but a welcome addition indeed.
Inline Previews
Inline preview of videos and pictures is another much touted feature of Twitter 2.0. Though a lot of video and image sources like DailyBooth, deviantART, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, USTREAM, Vimeo, yfrog, and YouTube are supported, clients like Brizzly have had this feature for months now.
Mini Profiles
Mini Profile
When you select a Twitter username, a mini profile of the user with number of tweets, followers, friends and lists are shown. Options to communicate with them and their recent tweets are also available. CoTweet has had this feature for quite a long time now.
The details pane to the right shows additional information related to the user or context when a Tweet is clicked upon. Depending on the tweeted content, you may see: replies, other Tweets by that user, a map of where a geotagged Tweet was sent from (if location enabled), and so on.
Final Thoughts
While some people are asking for multi-account access just like third party apps, I don’t see that happening anytime soon. First, Twitter is very slow to bring even minor feature enhancements and, second, it is a huge architectural change that could bring the “fail whale” back to life.
Large and successful companies bet big and take risks when they start up and tend to adapt a more lethargic, purely data driven and copy cat mentality once they attain critical mass. Case in point, Microsoft, Google and Firefox. But unfortunately Twitter, in its infancy, is already holding back major feature launches, not listening to users and isn’t shy to turn the copiers on when eventually making upgrades. To survive, Twitter should follow the footsteps of Facebook – come hell or highwater, do what is necessary and right. If in doubt, ask Myspace!