Twitter Redesign: An Op-Ed, Micro-Reviewed

"Twitter's Redesign is a Giant Leap Forward"
PCWorld (September 15, 2010)

"The redesign fundamentally changes the service's interface, with a roomy, context-sensitive right panel that reminds me of Twitter for iPad.

"I can't remember many - any? - examples of a popular service or piece of software changing so much all at once as Twitter is doing with its new redesign. (If you don't have it yet, hold on: The company says it'll be a few weeks until it completely replaces Old Twitter.) It brings elements other than words onto Twitter for the first time-photos, videos, and maps. It fundamentally changes the service's interface, with a roomy, context-sensitive right panel that reminds me of Twitter for iPad. It displays threaded conversations. It includes a bunch of subtleties, like keyboard shortcuts. (TechCrunch's MG Siegler has a good roundup of some of the revamping's less obvious improvements.)

"In short, it moves in the direction that Twitter was clearly going in anyhow -- but it's one big leap rather than a series of baby steps over months or years. And it still feels like Twitter...."

Even without the first-person-singular pronoun, this PCWorld op-ed would obviously be a just that - opinion-editorial content. Which is okay.

Looks like Twitter is going to expand the width of its content - leaving less room for folks to see the wallpaper. The writer doesn't like that, and the Lemming sees the point. On the other hand, the Lemming didn't design wallpaper with vital information on it.

As it is, I can't see much of the wording on some Twitter user's accounts - my preferred screen resolution isn't at the high end of the scale. (It's 1024 x 768 pixels.)

With personal preferences for screen resolution being all over the map, I designed my Twitter wallpaper to be non-boring; representative of what I do, more or less; and relatively unimportant.

Not everybody works that way, of course.

Twitter's got a quite entertaining, artsy - and comparatively uninformative - video about it's new, cool format: "Meet the new Twitter.com." It does get around to showing some of the features, which look cool. My guess - and hope is that what they do and how they work will become apparent when Twitter launches their new-and-improved service.

Now, if they can do this and keep the 'Fail Whale' from appearing at comparatively regular intervals, the Lemming will be a happy camper.

Sort-of-related posts:

• "Lemming Tracks: Twitter, Capacity, and Here We Go Again"
  (July 2, 2010)
• "Twitter's Password Plight(s)"
  (June 26, 2010)
• "Lemming Tracks: Twitter, Capacity, and AOL's Reality Check"
  (June 15, 2010)