Twitter unveiled an upgrade for its website Tuesday, showing off a dual-panel layout with embedded photos and video, among other enhancements.
While many power users rely on third-party desktop client tools to read and publish on Twitter, that's not how most people use the service, according to Twitter CEO Evan Williams. He said "78 percent of active users have used Twitter.com in the last 30 days."
The new site was available immediately for a small set of users, and a worldwide rollout is scheduled to follow incrementally, according to Williams.
Although Twitter has been frequently compared to Facebook as a tool for creating and maintaining social connections, Williams downplayed the comparison Tuesday, saying the company is primarily a real-time information network.
Twitter's 160-million-plus registered users now serve up more than 90 million tweets daily, consisting of short text messages of 140 characters or fewer, according to the company.
On the new Twitter, users can now click on a Tweet, opening up additional information about the tweet in a second panel. For example, if you click the Twitter handle, the right pane will show that person's mini-profile in the same window. In the past, clicking on the handle would open a new window, forcing users to leave the Twitter timeline.
Likewise, pictures and videos will play immediately on the right side of the page, without losing your place in the stream or having to open additional tabs or browser windows. Twitter partnered with 16 media companies, including YouTube, Flickr, TwitPic and Vimeo, to get permission to embed media from those sites onto Twitter.com.
The new design also expands the sidebar to include trends, links to suggested people to follow, as well as information about you (see example of the new default user page above).
"People can much more quickly grok the context of a tweet," Williams said, referring to the sidebar that includes information about a user mentioned in a tweet or other messages that use the same hash tag.
Williams called it a complete revamp that is very responsive. He said the site built using Twitter's own API.
You can now scroll endlessly, without ever having to hit a "more" button. Twitter also added keyboard shortcuts to make navigating the site faster.
Reactions on Twitter about the new Twitterwere mixed. Dave Winer, the father of RSS, said he was given access to the new version of the site but found it underwhelming. "Modest improvements. It's going to be confusing. Makes Twitter harder to use, imho," he wrote.
Others speculated that the new site would pose a challenge to third-party client developers, such as TweetDeck, Seesmic and others riding the Twitter wave. This spring, at Twitter's developer conference, the company unveiled its own mobile app, competing with its own allies. Despite the advantages of apps, Twitter's main bet for now remains on the browser.
The wide second panel drew some speculation about possibilities for advertising on the site, something the company has talked about in the past but has so far not implemented.
"Thought: a richer right-hand sidebar on Twitter.com will give Twitter plenty of real estate to serve up ads," said Brad Stone, a tech journalist with Bloomberg.
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