Twitter co-founder Evan Williams is trying to woo people back to Twitter’s Website (yes, the one that you probably only go to in order to change your password). It seems that it is an attempt to make the website do some of the cool things that the iPad app and other third party apps are already doing. Here are some of the improvements that @ev put out today:
- New design. The site has a cleaner timeline and a rich details pane that instantly adds more impact to individual Tweets while still maintaining the simplicity of the timeline. And, experience infinite scroll — you no longer have to click “more” to view additional Tweets.
- Media. Now, it’s easy to see embedded photos and videos directly on Twitter, thanks to partnerships with DailyBooth, DeviantART, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, USTREAM, Vimeo, yfrog, and YouTube.
- Related content. When you click a Tweet, the details pane shows additional information related to the author or subject. Depending on the Tweet’s content, you may see: @replies, other Tweets by that user, a map of where a geotagged Tweet was sent from, and more.
- Mini profiles. Click a @username to see a mini profile without navigating from the page, which provides quick access to account information, including bio and recent Tweets.
Here’s the “feel good” video that shows some of the new features. Note: No fail whales appear in this video… so does that mean they fixed that??
I’ll take a look at it as it is rolled out to the general public (apparently I wasn’t popular enough to get into the initial test group.) I’m just hoping that Twitter has worked on all those “Fail Whale” problems and that this doesn’t just make that issue worse. Otherwise, a big night with a series of down time, simply makes for more fail whale jokes.