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Twitter Redesigns Around Four Concepts: Home Timeline, Connect, Discover, Me

• gojomo 15y ago
  Like the changes conceptually; the unified 'Connect' timeline has already highlighted to me retweets I'd have otherwise misssed. Hate the new iPhone font/margin choices. Text seems smaller, fainter with no setting to enlarge. New gray margins noticeably waste precious space that could be communication.
• raganwald 15y ago
  Twitter redesigns ^^
  • rsoto 15y ago
    Judging from the URL, it seems like TC's mistake, altough OP just posted it as it is.
• thwarted 15y ago
  I count five items, not four, in that headline.
  • dmbass 15y ago
    1. Home Timeline 2. Connect 3. Discover 4. Me
  • thwarted 15y ago
    I guess I missed a comma when viewing on my mobile device.
• ashamedlion 15y ago
  I absolutely love updates, but the new iPhone app feels like a big F U to power users. They're de-emphasizing direct messages by putting them a level down in the "Me" tab and switching accounts if you have multiple is found in the same place. Also, not a fan of the wasted space on the sides of the tweet feed. However, the new web design looks great.
  • bmuon 15y ago
    I wouldn't expect the "official" apps to be power user friendly. TweetDeck will remain the app for the PU.
    • sabret00the 15y ago
      Have you seen what they've done to Tweetdeck? They've dumbed it down and made it incredibly difficult for PUs. I suspect we'll finally see an open source alternative pop up.
  • shinratdr 15y ago
    De-emphasizing direct messages makes sense. Twitter is accepting its role as a mostly passive service. Having a conversation through DM requires both parties to be following each other, a frankly rare scenario when most people are following companies, organizations and celebrities or notables. You may not like it but if you make any real use of direct messages, I'm pretty sure you are an atypical user now. In most situations, people use Timeline mentions to achieve the same thing, but without the secrecy and limitations direct messages introduce. I don't have a problem with this at all, frankly. It leaves a big opening for 3rd party clients to fill the gap, while repositioning the Twitter for iPhone app as the best choice for the mainstream Twitter user (which it wasn't previously but is as of 4.0). It may not be in your best interests, but I think it's a smart move that's in the long term interests of the service. Twitter, from the beginning, has always been about learning from the community and observing how people use the service rather than telling them how to use the service. This is just one more lesson learned from actual users. The rest of the UI changes are quite painful, though. I support the previously discussed changes, but overall the 4.0 update is a regression in terms of the UI. EDIT - I write all that, then I see this in my timeline: "Twitter for iPhone pro-tip: swipe up on Me for DMs and swipe left on Me to switch accounts." I guess they found a compromise. Actually, that's pretty amazing. Nobody else has to think about DMs if they don't want to, but power users still get instant access. Great job, Twitter.
  • BSeward 15y ago
    "Twitter for iPhone pro-tip: swipe up on Me for DMs and swipe left on Me to switch accounts." /via https://mobile.twitter.com/bhaggs/status/144846707925061632 https://mobile.twitter.com/bhaggs/status/144846707925061632 Not the most discoverable gesture, but it's there, though it's only a little weirder than "swipe across tweet for secondary actions" (though on that topic I'll miss using that to quickly save links to Instapaper).
• hrabago 15y ago
  Twitter has become like GMail for me - I access the service but not the application. I've been using the Mail app on the iPhone to access all my GMail accounts, and use Tweetbot for Twitter. The services keep tweaking their own UI's, but as long as they don't block the functionalities that 3rd party apps need, I think I'll be fine.
  • Qz 15y ago
    ...but as long as they don't block the functionalities that 3rd party apps need... Not a safe bet by any means.
  • wgx 15y ago
    Same here - plus "Twitter for Mac" on OS X. I can't remember the last time I went to twitter.com, it's very rare anyway.
• tomkarlo 15y ago
  If you swipe left on the "Me" button at the bottom of the iPhone app, it brings up an account selection screen. That seems like a mind-boggling UI decision to me - a swipeable button with no affordance for the swipe and no indication of why it reacted differently to a swipe than a press. Update: apparently if you swipe up, it shows you DMs. So once you touch that button, you're probably going to some screen, even if you don't want to. I can imagine the product meeting now: "You're getting rid of the DM icon?" "Yeah, but we'll figure out a way users can get to it directly."
  • king_magic 15y ago
    I almost didn't believe you about swipe-left-on-Me. I... just don't understand. What could have possibly made them think that was a good idea? I would have never figured that out in a million years. Yes, it's true that under "Me" is a "Switch Accounts" button that does the exact same thing, and that's fine, but the idea of implementing swipe-left-on-Me seems to go completely against Apple's HIG and the entire notion of intuitively discovering functionality.
    • lukeholder 15y ago
      I honestly believe it is a marketing technique. Look at the number of tweets announcing the secret 'pro-tip' it something that pro twitter users can use and feel special (because they use DM /swipe up/ and have multiple accounts. The rest of the users aren't hardcore and dont care about getting to those things in 2 taps.
    • Hrothgar15 15y ago
      You can swipe left from Me across the tab bar which flips the view over. Makes perfect sense if you think about it.
      • tomkarlo 15y ago
        At least on iOS there's nothing to imply that's a tab bar, and certainly no visual affordance of that action. Maybe you're on Android - I'm hearing comments from Android that make it sound like the UI is more "tabby" on that version.
• fedxc 15y ago
  Paul Haddad (Tweetbot dev) should be thanking Twitter.
  • shinratdr 15y ago
    If you check his timeline, you'll notice that he did.
• venturebros 15y ago
  How do I get access to the new web version? On the twitter site is says to download the new app which I did so now how do I get the new web version?
  • garethsprice 15y ago
    Open the app and log in, it seems to set some kind of flag on your account. Then after a refresh on the desktop, the new client appears. Interesting technique, are they trying to drive downloads of the mobile client or are they using "people who can/will download the latest mobile client" as a proxy to select power users to test the new interface on?
    • venturebros 15y ago
      Got it finally! It took about an hour just refreshed again and it is there. I am not a power user. Perhaps they found that more people tweet from mobile devices that is why they doing it this way?
• ry0ohki 15y ago
  Surprised it still doesn't have hyperlinks (and Twitter handles mentioned) clickable from the Timeline. Echofon has done this forever, and the Twitter desktop client does it.
  • flyosity 15y ago
    It's more computationally expensive to calculate, draw and attach tap events to rows in a UITableView if you're trying to still keep 60fps scrolling. It's hard enough to get glass-like scrolling with dynamically-loading avatars and random strings of text at different font sizes all over, but tappable things and highlighting makes it even harder.
    • ry0ohki 15y ago
      Echofon does it somehow? I'd rather have form over function, but I'm probably in the minority.
    • BigZaphod 15y ago
      Twitterrific has done this for a long time. It was hard to make it perform well, but not impossible.
      • Hrothgar15 15y ago
        Still not 60 FPS. :)
    • Zev 15y ago
      Um. What? While, yes, it is more expensive to detect that something is a link than not, it isn't that expensive to do. Neither is drawing an attributed string with Core Text. Yes, its hard. No, it isn't nearly as hard as you're making it out to be. And making things tappable/highlightable? The tableview isn't scrolling when you're tapping. Detecting a tap and performing some calculations to determine which text run the tap falls on cannot cause scrolling performance to go down.
• kristofferR 15y ago
  I think it's time for Twitter to move away from the strict 140 letter limit. It has served them well, but not anymore. Now it's just severely restricting the usefulness of the service and if they don't fix it soon Google+ will grab a lot of Twitter-users who are limited by the limit, like myself. I don't have the time or enough things I'd like to say in order for it to warrant getting a blog, but not everything I'd like to say fits into 140 characthers either. It would actually relatively easy for Twitter to fix this issue. Just do it like Reddit does for self-posts. Simply enable people to embed text the same way it lets people embed pictures and videos. It solves all the major issues Twitter is having - people will stop shortening their tweets so much that they lose their intended meaning/readablity, Google+ stops having a major content advantage due to no characther limit and the feed won't get cluttered by walls of text (unlike Google+).
  • macrael 15y ago
    Maaaybe this would work, but it would have to be significantly different to post long text than to post the regular 140 characters. What makes twitter great is the feed is easy to get through because everyone is limited in what they can add to it. I like that every tweet is essentially the same size. Simply lifting the limit on the regular tweet would be a grave mistake. Them becoming essentially a static blog hosting provider that you can link to in a tweet seems like not a terrible idea, though.
  • msbarnett 15y ago
    I really disagree. The forced constraints of Twitter are its greatest virtue. I can follow 200+ people only because I know that they'll be forced to be concise in what they say and how they say it. Google+ felt unwieldily at a half-dozen people because at some point each of them would succumb to the temptation to write a 1600+ word post, and no matter how interesting I found them, it turned the act of surveying my timeline from a nearly effortless, quick glance experience into a depressing exercise in reminding myself that there were endless reams of text I was falling behind on and could never hope to find the time to catch up with. I have the same problem with RSS readers; beyond some very low limit, it becomes dispiriting to see how much stuff I will never find the time to keep up with, so I stop using the app. Twitter doesn't have this effect on me precisely because it forces everyone to be brief and digestible. A "New Twitter" in which I have to curate my timeline down from 200 to 6 is a Twitter I just stop using.
• gaving 15y ago
  Fairly skeptical initially, but liking the changes so far. Web interface seems a lot more stable and fiddly too. You'll pry my tweet bot from my cold, dead hands though.
• sabret00the 15y ago
  Normally I don't give too much stock to redesigns of any particular service when there are clients that do the job much better. But seeing as they've destroyed Tweetdeck, once the new design reaches me, I'll probably give it a go before finding another service. At that point, I'll probably move towards something like Tumblr for my mundane chat designed to break up my working day.