Twitter has begun refreshing its interface for desktop and mobile apps and also introducing a selection of new features to the micro-blogging social phenomenon, which currently commands 300-million users who firing their daily dose of 140 characters or less between pals and popular and cultural figures.
Noticeably first-hand is the side switch of timeline and everything else (who to follow etc etc..) – Twitter has flipped the bird and you’ll now find your real-time feed on the right. Seemingly without any real reason! But what is good is the addition of a new menu bar including Home, Connect and Discover tabs. Home is an easy one and allows you to nip back to the start at any time. Connect is your new Activity, which lets you see you’re most recent followers as well as check up on any mentions you might have or if your tweets have been retweeted. Discover is a very cool addition. Based on Twitter’s trendy hashtagging concept, you’ll now be able to use the Discover feature to browse for popular topics and current trends and discover new ones as they break cover (hence the name).
In addition to this new taskbar, there’s a much more expansive profile section. You or your followers can open up a full page version of your or their profile featuring more information than the limited words available previously as well as full sized avatar image.
Apps for Apple iPhone and Android smartphones also get a spruce up, gaining the desirable new taskbar and tabs set, but the refresh is yet to touch down on iPad – We’ll attempt to keep you posted on this one.
Visually there are some polish ups on both desktop and mobile app, but essentially nothing is out of place. The fancy new quill icon you can click to write a tweet is a particularly nice touch and we’ll look forward to checking this out once we get the update. If you’ve already got your Twitter update, tweet @ us!
NB: In addition to Twitter itself, popular social hub TweetDeck has had a brush up. Swapping Adobe Air for HTML5, it now only delivers Twitter and Facebook feeds – MySpace, FourSquare and LinkedIn have been unfriended.
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