Last week, Twitter announced a redesign of it's website and mobile apps, putting greater emphasis on photos and videos.
Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo appeared on NBC-TV's “Today” show to announce the design overhaul making photos and videos more prominent. Costolo indicated Twitter was responding to Twitter users who wanted better ways to express themselves in 140 characters. “What we heard over and over again from our users is they want to bring more of their personality to their profile pages,” he said.
The mobile apps will now display photos attached to previous Tweets in a horizontal bar below the latest three Tweets allowing you to scroll through the photos with one swipe. The redesign also enables you to upload a new “Header Photo” that will appear at the top of your profile page with your picture in the middle.
This is a great opportunity for professionals and businesses to visually express their brand to their Twitter followers. Businesses can create a design using their logo or do something creative that relates to their business. I saw a page for a coffee company and its Header Photo was a pile of coffee beans. There are many ways you can portray your business and express your personality at the same time. If done right, this can be great for businesses and professionals alike. Take a look at how The Friedman Group took advantage of that space.
Other changes include mobile third-party apps like yFrog and Twitpic will no longer be able to post images to Twitter. This is likely to result in Twitter gaining more control over advertising dollars that were previously going to these third-party apps. Twitter has been trying for some time to bring users back into the fold. Mostly this has been done through acquisitions like TweetDeck and Posterous. Remember, though Twitter users number 140 million and Tweets are in excess of 400 million a day, users access the service through a multitude of third-party apps like Hootsuite, Metro Twit, Echofon and others.
Though Facebook and Twitter are different services, clearly each has some features the other is trying to replicate. With last week's changes, it seems that having a large profile photo and easy access to a photo stream are elements of Facebook that Twitter thinks work and wanted to bring to its own users.
I'm curious to know what you think of the new design and other changes?
