The New Twitter Homepage Is, as Reported, Search-alicious!
by Kara Swisher
Posted on July 28, 2009 at 8:22 PM PT
BoomTown reported last week that Twitter was planning on debuting a new homepage this week.
And presto–it’s up!
You can see the new page above (click on the image to make it larger), which is heavy on search, as well as topic trends.
I am not sure this makes the site a “Google-killer,” as some have predicted, with Twitter dominating real-time search.
But the blue is a very pretty shade, although I still want the microblogging service to 86 that annoying Twitter bird (alert PETA stat!).
In an interview with BoomTown last week, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the homepage was rejiggered “to better show who we are.”
Stone said the old welcome page was essentially confusing to the masses of people who came to the innovative start-up, made aware of the microblogging service by the massive media hype it has received over the last year.
“You can try it out without having to sign up, so you can get an idea of what Twitter is before you use it,” said Stone last week. “We need to do a better job of explaining ourselves to people who hear about us and then have no idea what do to.”
Stone was right, as you can see from the image of the old homepage below (click on the image to make it larger).
Stone also said in the interview that the goal is to make the page as lively as Twitter is.
“We have to turn a lot of awareness into engagement,” said Stone. “Our front page is not reflective of that right now.”
Now, it presumably is, bird by irksome bird.
Comments
Twitter needs to find a way (real humans perhaps) to clean up the Treading Topics of all the garbage in there. It won’t be so great when the Newbies go to, say, the Harry Potter trending topic, and find all the “harry potter caSh money” spam, or malware and porn.
It’s annoying for the rest of us too. Grrrrr
Posted by Bruce Evans at July 28th, 2009 at 10:09 pmBrother, do you have that “right on.” You get many spam/porn “followers” that you have to block every now and then so that the “followers” you want (i.e. the people you “follow” for the most part) don’t think you are some kind of nutcase or worse.
Posted by Steve Schmidt at July 29th, 2009 at 1:45 am