Tag Archives: Twitter

Twitter Rolls Out A New Facebook Like Design

After months of testing, Twitter finally rolled out a new design that makes the popular micro-blogging service look a lot similar to Facebook.  Twitter’s blog post, a couple of hours back announced the website’s revamped looks.

Though the changes are mostly cosmetic and seem to focus on image resizing, the introduction of “pinned tweets”  allows users to stick a specific tweet to the top of their own timeline, similar to how the old Facebook status would remain in place. That pinned tweet functions much like a promoted tweet for your profile. Twitter now also highlights those tweets that have the most engagement by displaying them slightly larger than the others.

With this development, two of the world’s most traffic generating websites- Twitter and Facebook, look shockingly similar. Both have a giant, widescreen background image with a little square box towards the lower left corner of the background photo which is in all wisdom meant for displaying your photo or a “profile picture”  in Facebook lingo.

WireCult - TWITTER ROLLS OUT A NEW FACEBOOK LIKE DESIGN
Actress Kerry Washington’s Twitter profile displaying her “Pinned Tweet”

The introduction of larger images reflect Twitter’s ambition to become a bigger player in the photo sharing arena. The micro-blogging service had recently introduced the ability to upload four photos in a single tweet, as well as the feature to tag photo in the background of images, instead of wasting space in the tweet itself.
In short, here are main features of Twitter’s new web profile:

  • Best Tweets: Tweets that experience most engagement will appear slightly larger than the other Tweets.
  • Pinned Tweet: You can now pin one of your Tweets to the top of your page. It could be an away message, promoting your own website, or a tweet reflective of your online persona.
  • Filtered Tweets: Now you can choose which timeline to view when checking out other profiles. It’s now possible to filter tweets posted by other people by opting to see only tweets or tweets with photos or videos, or tweets and their replies.

The new profile changes have kicked in today for some of us and will be automatic for new users. Over the week, it will be gradually rolled out for other Twitter users as well. At the bottom of its blog post, Twitter has added a list of “celebrity” accounts that already sport the new design, including The United States’ First Lady, Michelle Obama’s Twitter account.

While it’s certainly a lot of changes for an “accustomed” Twitter user, the new profile still manages to look relatively clean. The looks seem more aesthetic now. Well that’s our take. What do you think of the changes? Or do you have something more to add to the story? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Twitter Now Supports Emojis On Its Web Version

Love expressing emotions while typing on the web? Then we got some good news for you. Twitter has begun showing emoji characters on its main Twitter.com website. Though for now, they come only on the desktop versions of the service.

Twitter Now Supports Emojis On Its Web Version
Twitter Emojis | Screenshot Courtesy: twitter.com/Support

With this, Twitter has rolled out a much awaited feature. The reactions from Twitter fans are mixed though the majority of them seem to be upbeat about this new development.

However, the emojis aren’t supported on tweets that are embedded on websites. Here’s the original tweet from Twitter Support that announced this feature. You can see empty squares here in place of the emojis used.

We hope Twitter fixes this real soon.

Twitter Mobile Update – Introduces Filters, Photo Cropping – Pushes Trending Events to the Top

Have you been a fan of Twitter forever now but always felt let down when it came to sharing photos. Well we got you some good news. If you’re an Android user, your virtual life just got a little easier. The microblogging website’s latest app update adds a simple photo-editor letting you add filters to your images, crop and rotate pics without using a third-party program. These features may also help Twitter in containing users from migrating to popular photo-sharing apps like Instagram, which is owned by Facebook now. The update also flashes a reminder to @mention friends whenever you upload images with people in it, imitating Facebook’s popular photo-tagging trait.

You can choose up to 8 Filters
You can choose from 8 Filters

The second update gives users a significant way of discovering events and monitoring real-time trends on the microblogging network. Twitter has pushed its iconic Trending Events right to the top of the timeline allowing timeline users to even have a detailed view of these trends – to the extent of displaying the number of Tweets about every trending topic! Pulling down on the timeline further reveals other exciting features – if there aren’t any new tweets to load, the app will recommend tweets, trending topics and will suggest you users to follow.

Trending Topics
Trending Topics

While these new updates to the Twitter feed are available only for Android as of now, the microblogging service promises that they’ll soon bring it to the iOS platform.