Very recently, Twitter changed it’s home page to a newer, more sleek and modern design. The old homepage was quite bulky and outdated. One reason for the redesign was to explain to Twitter newcomers what Twitter really is. If you’ve ever tried to do this, it’s hard. People usually tell others that “Twitter is a service to stay connected with your friends and tell them what you’re doing”, but most people respond with: “who cares what I’m doing?” Now Twitter has changed its tagline to “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world,” since Twitter has now become an avenue for news, advertising, and public announcements.
Placing a list of trending topics by the hour, day, and week also helped to exemplify this concept. The trending topics could be clicked and search results consisting of the most recent tweets would pop up. Another prominent new feature in the new homepage was Search, which can also be found in http://twitter.com/search (and it took me a long time to discover that it was even there!) Furthermore, Twitter.com/search now redirects to Twitter.com, so the two have merged.
The homepage didn’t have the screenshot of Twitter/Home anymore either. In my opinion, that was a good change, because I didn’t want to squint to read the text, and though I did, I knew it wouldn’t make sense to a newcomer. I still wish they had the “watch a video” link so people could discover more.
Overall, the new homepage design was a wise change. Hopefully now, Twitter will have more traffic and people joining the conversation