Have you heard about the new Twitter.com? The revised site offers embedded media, infinite scroll, and a host of new user experience enhancements. World-wide roll-out begins today, but depending on where exactly you are, it could take several weeks for the new features to reach you.
One of the biggest changes facing Twitter.com users is the different layout, which in my opinion, resembles the new iPad native Twitter app. Your @mentions, retweets, searches, and lists sits directly above your timeline now, creating an easy way to switch your view depending on what you’re interested in seeing. On the right, the default starting panel will show you recent followers, who you’re following, along with recent trending topics and suggestions on who to follow.
Clicking a specific tweet causes a panel to slide out to the right, showing you that user’s recent tweets and if they’ve embedded some media with their tweet, you can see a larger version of that as well. If the tweet was geo-tagged, the right-hand panel will display the location on a map. Twitter is offering an easy way to embed both photos and video directly in your tweets, which will be visible within other user’s timelines or visible upon clicking a tweet containing embedded media.
With partnerships with the likes of Vimeo, YouTube, twitpic, Flickr and others, embedding will be easy and seamless. One of the coolest examples of this new feature is sharing a link to an entire Flickr set of pictures. When you do, those who follow will be able to see a bunch of little thumbnails in their right pane. And near the bottom of this pane, a slideshow for the pictures is also automatically created. Very slick indeed.
Finally, there are a score of improved upon and refined features in the latest iteration of the Twitter site. A few of the notable improvements including the ability to use keyboard shortcuts (hit the “?” key for a handy list), much clearer retweet and favorite labels which make these types of tweets stand out more, larger profile pictures, and with a tip of the hat to location-based goodness, ‘Tweets Near Me’ will show you who is tweeting nearby. Interested in learning more? Check out the official video here.
Do you have the new twitter? If so, be sure to let us know what you think in the comments!
