Twitter's Big Redesign Adds Photos, Videos, Brand Pages
Twitter launches a major redesign with more multimedia content, new profiles, and company pages. What's changed, and what hasn't?
Twitter launched a major redesign Thursday, aiming to pack more multimedia content and interactivity into its social media experience without breaking its bedrock 140-character limit.
The revamped Twitter user interface for the Web now links to photos and videos and displays that show up in-line with the stream of posts. Twitter said it focused on simplifying the user interface to make it easier for users to learn more about people and topics referenced in their stream with one click.
While preserving many elements of the design Twitter has been using from the past several months, the main navigation links at the top of the screen are now Home, @Connect, and #Discover--with @Connect as the tab for exploring your mentions and conversation and #Discover as the tab for searching and exploring trending topics according to their hashtags.
The revamp will be accompanied by user interface changes to TweetDeck, which was acquired by Twitter earlier this year, and to Twitter's iPhone and Android clients. The changes are effective immediately for the Web clients, as well as the mobile.twitter.com mobile website, and will be rolled out to Web users over the next few weeks.
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Ad Ages reports Twitter is also introducing brand pages that will allow advertisers more freedom to customize the presentation of their Twitter profiles and display their logos and taglines more prominently.
According to Ad Age, the first brand page sponsors will include American Express, Best Buy, Bing, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, Dell , Disney, General Electric, Hewlitt-Packard, Intel, JetBlue, Kia, McDonald's, Nike , PepsiCo, Staples, Verizon Communications Wireless, NYSE Euronext, Heineken, Subway, and a Paramount Pictures movie page for "Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol."
Facebook has long offered brand pages, and Google+ recently added them, but so far Twitter seems to be only offering them to major advertisers. On Facebook, any business or organization can establish a page for free, although Facebook does encourage using those pages as the destination for advertising campaigns. Google+ doesn't offer advertising yet, but so far brand pages do not require any commercial relationship with Google.
Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard
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