A daily digest of IT news, curated from blogs, forums and news sites around the web each morning. We highlight the key commentary and demystify the real story.
The "New New Twitter" is in the house. The user interface has been radically overhauled, and some people don't like that. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers ponder the movement of cheese.
Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention: Cloudville...
Sharon Gaudin reports:
The new, simplified design will be rolled out over the next few weeks. ... Part of the redesign has Twitter trying to help users find information that would interest them. ... Twitter also is focused on helping new users figure out how to...use the site...get to the information they want, and find people and companies.
...
This redesign follows one that Twitter made to its interface in the fall of 2010. The company [retained] the old interface until August, when everyone was...switch[ed] to the new look.
Brian Womack adds:
The service will feature tabs at the top of the screen that let users more easily [use it]. ... Twitter is enhancing the service to win over more users and make the site more attractive to advertisers. ... Twitters Timeline feature will be 500 percent faster.
Chris Martin gives it a spin:
The...layout has changed. ... Your Twitter feed is now on the right and your profile, who you follow and trends are on the left. ... There are four new tabs. ... Connect and discover are specifically related to the '@' at-tag and '#' hash-tag symbols.
...
A new feature is called embedded tweets', which allows users to add any tweet...to a web site using a line of code.
Casey Chan says "You're probably going to hate" it:
[T]his is a Twitter for the lurkers. ... The focus seems to be more on watching a conversation occur and seeing a story happen rather than joining the conversation yourself. ... It's a major shift in ideology, one that's been a long time coming.
...
[T]he first impression is a little jarring: it's not particularly, er, pretty...and having to dig down to get to your DMs doesn't seem particularly practical.
...
Over all though, this is Twitter admitting that...it's a world that more of us observe than create.
You don't see the new UI? Here's why -- let's fly:
You can get early access on your computer by downloading and logging into Twitter for iPhone or Twitter for Android.
...
We now have a framework in place that we will quickly build and iterate upon to help users connect with whatever is meaningful to them.
