Twitter.com unveils a new, richer interface

During a major press event at its San Francisco headquarters yesterday, Twitter unveiled a new version of Twitter.com. The refresh will be immediately available to only one percent of its 160-million registered users at first, but will roll out to everyone during the coming weeks.

The biggest notable difference is in the manner that user feeds are presented. A new two pane approach sees the old timeline and tweets presented in the left-hand column, with details about a specific tweet presented in the right. You could, for instance, see if a tweet is part of a thread, the profile of the tweet’s author, as well as location information.

Twitter will now also present an individual tweet’s photos, which affects 3rd party content such as Twitpic and videos from Youtube, Vimeo and Ustream in the right-hand pane. This new method of in-line displaying of media means that users won’t have to click through when they want to consume media.

According to Twitter CEO Evan Williams, “Twitter’s focus has changed from ‘what are you doing?’ to ‘what’s happening?’” Built using Twitter’s own API, the new interface has been optimised for speed, responsiveness and discovery. Pop-up overlays are more frequently used and the “more” button has been deprecated in favour of infinite scrolling. Williams said that he feels that it’s the best Twitter interface yet, on any platform.

Twitter has achieved a growth rate of 100 percent over the last year, and 78 percent of users have accessed Twitter.com in the last 30 days, making its native website still the most popular way to access the service.

Although the new version aims to better balance consumption with contribution, Twitter hopes that users who mostly consume content from the service will find the new version particularly helpful. Williams was quoted as saying “You don’t have to tweet to use Twitter any more than you have to create a web page to use the web”.

Williams also revealed some noteworthy statistics. Twitter overall now has more than 90 million tweets a day, 25 percent of which contain links. It gets 370 000 new signups per day, 16 percent of which are from a mobile device, and mobile users are up 250 percent since the beginning of 2010.

Click here for more pictures and video explaining the “new” Twitter.