In a surprise announcement today, Twitter started rolling out a brand new experience for its website, mobile apps and Tweetdeck, too. Generally speaking, it shifts Twitter ever closer to becoming a media company, rather than just a communications platform. First off, here’s Twitter’s demo video:
While the experience is slowing rolling out for everyone, downloading a new mobile app should trigger the roll-over on your account on the web. (This took a couple attempts, and I had to load Twitter.com on a new browser for it to kick in.) Here’s @LostRemote with our jazzy background image:
You’ll notice a home, connect and discover tab in the upper left of the site. Home is your tweet stream, now with “view photo” and “view video” links that open media in-stream when available. Connect is a tally of recent interactions, from RTs to follows and favorites. And the biggest addition to the site is the new “Discover” tab:
The top item, appropriately perhaps, is the Virginia Tech shooting. It’s a photo that links to a tweet, and you can also “view tweets like this,” organized by hashtag. This is Twitter’s first step to making the site more media-like, curating the most interesting tweets and hashtags on a eye-pleasing page. It’s a small, but meaningful shift from a communications platform to a curator. By all indications, the stories on the Discover tab are human-selected.
I have yet to play with the new iPad app, but as Twitter makes its experiences more media-like, it’s also positioning its mobile apps to be more like second screens. Imagine, for example, if Twitter included audio identification in its apps, allowing them to sense a TV show in progress and then expose tweets that fit the show’s hashtag. Hmmm.
Another substantial addition are the enhanced brand pages, which have been rumored for over a year. Here’s Pepsi’s brand page, one of 21 marketers to launch:
Beyond the cover image, you’ll notice that the YouTube clip on Pepsi’s page is defaulted in the expanded, embedded position. That’s a promoted tweet that appears to be pinned to the top of its feed.
Twitter told Ad Age that the 21 brands were selected to launch first because they’re “strategic partners and advertisers that have been involved in ongoing dialogues with Twitter.”
There are some other new goodies launched today. First, you can now embed tweets all over the web. Inside the new design, you’ll see “embed this tweet” links on individual tweet pages. And Twitter also rolled out “mention” and “hashtag” buttons that allow you to pop open a Tweet window with the mention or hashtag pre-populated.
So… a big day for Twitter. What are your thoughts about the new design?
