Twitter wants your eyeballs on their site, offers matchsticks.
Make no mistake the UI/design changes Twitter announced last night make Twitter.com a much sexier/stickier place to visit for the masses…and that means happy advertisers. In a nutshell there’ll soon (next two weeks soon!) be a much more picture/video heavy element to Twitter.com (similar to Facebooks newsfeed). More details and subtle extras over at TechCrunch. But for me this announcement really smacked of Twitter’s focus and ambition – they’re moving on and moving fast – the mobile experience/offering is good, can be tweaked, but overall pretty sound. There’s only so far you can go before you disrupt that experience. This move, however, reeks of a revamp for a future push into a sexier display/engagement ad land (if all that white space and the focussed content areas is anything to go by).
Is that a bad thing? Time will tell – sponsored tweets are going well and generally not offensive to the users – their hearts are firmly in the right place – what will be interesting is the next few moves by Twitter as this young company continues to grow up. The world is certainly waiting for more analytics and the elusive self-serve ad model.
Video below / screenshots via TechCrunch:
Some reactions about the new look from ze tinterwebs:
- The New Twitter.com (techvibes.com)
- Thoughts on the new Twitter.com (techflash.com)
- Twitter.com Gets a Revamp To Look Like a Twitter App [Twitter] (gizmodo.com)
- OMG, It’s the New Twitter! (twitterrati.com)
