09 December 2011, 12:54 Business

Just Twitter

Twitter has updated the interface

Twitter is changing its design: it will become more friendly for users, even those who are poorly versed in communication services, the resource administration promises. Management needs to increase the audience to maintain the interest of advertisers.

The Twitter microblogging service has introduced an updated interface. In a few weeks it will be available for both desktop and mobile versions. The goal of the first redesign in 5 years is to make Twitter easier for users, the service administration says.

The pages will include a detailed explanation of how to use the # and @ symbols. In addition, users will be offered news feeds and entertainment services. Now the main functionality of Twitter involves updating the feeds of “friends” and brands that the user follows.

On the main page, the most noticeable change was the shift of the personal information blog to the left. Here you can view lists of readers, followed accounts, photos and send a tweet in the top panel window, attaching a photo, a link to a video or news.

The updates also affected the “In touch” (@Connect) and “In the know ” (#Discover) pages.

The “In touch” tab allows you to see the list of subscribers, the number of mentions of the user, retweets of messages and responses.

The “In the Course” tab contains sections “Actions”, reflecting the actions of “friends”, “Browse categories”, in which the user can search for messages according to specified parameters, “Kindred”, “Stories”.

The last section is self-learning: by analyzing user actions, it allows you to find the messages that are most interesting to him. It also simplifies the search for information of interest by grouping events by subject.

Twitter users will have access to mobile versions of the updated application for iPhone smartphones and Android devices.

The new Twitter design will be launched within a few weeks, and a new version of the application for the iPad tablet will be released soon.

More than 200 million people are now registered on the Twitter microblog, and 50 million use Twitter daily. Among American adults, 13% use Twitter, according to the Pew Internet Center. The majority of Twitter users in the United States are under 35 years of age.

The update was launched to encourage people to spend more time on Twitter and to attract more advertising, said Jack Dorsey , the resource's founder. "By revealing the history of a message and all the other messages associated with it, it will encourage people to spend more time on Twitter," he hopes.

Dorsey acknowledges that Twitter's design can be confusing, citing the example of coverage of the revolution in Egypt. News from Cairo was updated in posts under the nickname #Jan25. But many of those who are new to the service went to it, looked for these records and could not find them. “Eventually, those people left,” laments Dorsey, noting that topics of interest are now easier to find: they are displayed on the “Discover” page.

“There are still billions of people who can use Twitter,” Twitter President Dick Costolo commented on the updates. “We must provide a simple and convenient way for people to connect around the world.” He added that users who used Twitter for the first time will now find it easier to navigate the blog.

Social networks can add functionality to the interface at any time and make it easier to use, says Zeus Carrevala, chief analyst at ZK Research. “This particular update looks cool,” he said. “All changes to Twitter are made solely for the benefit of users.”

Simplifying the design will attract new users and, accordingly, increase advertisers’ interest in the resource, Twitter administration expects.

“This is still a small business with insufficient advertising volumes that is looking for a way to become big,” Hudson Square Research analyst Rory Maher previously explained. According to his calculations, Twitter is close to profitability and earns about $200 million a year from advertising. Previously, a pool of investors, which includes the investment fund of Yuri Milner and Alisher Usmanov DST, organized financing for the company based on a business valuation of $8 billion. This is 40 annual revenues of the Internet service, and such a price can hardly be called fair, Maher argued.