Does the New Twitter Provide Mass Appeal?
This week, Twitter introduced a new redesign of Twitter.com with a two-pane format aimed at providing a richer user experience, and you can easily tell by looking at it that it does just that.
“Twitter has always been about getting a lot in a little,” says CEO Evan Williams. “The constraint of 140 characters drives conciseness and lets you quickly discover and share what’s happening. Yet, we’ve learned something since starting Twitter—life doesn’t always fit into 140 characters or less.”
Twitter has partnered with Dailybooth, DeviantArt, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, Twitvid, USTREAM, Vimeo, Yfrog, and YouTube to make tweeted content more useful directly from Twitter.com itself. Users will have less reason to click away from the site.
The first pane is essentially the single pane from today’s Twitter – the timeline. In the second pane, referred to as the “details pane”, users will see additional info related to the author or subject of a tweet, when clicked. This pane will also display things like @replies, other tweets from that user, maps, videos, photos, etc. Users can click the @username to see profiles from the same page.
Making Twitter more appealing to the mainstream means greater value for businesses and marketers.
Ex-Twitter engineer Alex Payne, who parted ways with the company after failing to see eye to eye with executives on the direction Twitter needed to go in, had some interesting things to say about the redesign.
“While Twitter has been growing in mainstream significance and popularity, it hasn’t managed to adopt a strategy that clearly aims the company towards mass market success,” he writes. “I think #newtwitter changes that, turning the site into a rich information discovery platform, if you’ll excuse the buzzword bingo. The new design is a pleasure to use, and encourages a kind of deep exploration of the data within Twitter that has previously only been exposed in bits and pieces by third-party applications. Browsing Twitter is now as rewarding as communicating with it.”
“One of the striking things about new twitter is how clearly it’s designed to allow room for advertisements and promotions,” adds Payne. “As an early employee who heard a lot of internal discussion about monetization strategies that eschewed the typical Silicon Valley ad play, Twitter’s accelerating turn towards that business model is, on some level, a little disappointing. But as a stockholder and someone who wants to see the company survive and succeed, it’s clearly the most pragmatic way for Twitter to capitalize on its substantial and growing network. Ads have their role in the wheel of commerce, and just as Google’s text ads are more palatable than most forms of advertising, Twitter’s approach could end up being eminently tolerable, even useful.”
Search and the New Twitter
Danny Sullivan has a great article about the impact the Twitter redesign could have on search. This is obviously a key element for businesses to consider. Among his points:
1. The search box becomes more prominent.
2. More filtering options
3. “Save this search” becomes more prominent
4. Infinite scrolling on search results
5. People and company results more clearly separated
6. Tweets Near You feature
7. Tweets with Links feature
8. Searches for retweets by others, retweets by you, and your tweets, retweeted
How Will Users React Once its Rolled Out?
The changes will be rolling out over the next several weeks as a preview. During this period, users will be able to switch back and forth between the new design and the old one, though frankly I can’t see any advantage to using the old one.
Redesigns typically get some amount of user backlash, and this will be probably fall in line with that tradition, but this particular redesign has some advantages. For one, many Twitter users are already using apps rather than Twitter.com anyway. Secondly, Twitter has left a lot of people wondering what the point of the service is. This has been a problem since it launched. This will help people understand its value more.
Now, if Twitter could just get those Fail Whales under control…
Filed under Breaking News by on Sep 19th, 2010. 
Google’s Matt Cutts discussed two key ingredients of where Google is headed in an interview out in Vegas. The first of these ingredients is of course Google’s much discussed Algorithm update (Caffeine), which was recently found to begin rolling out soon.
Caffeine will not roll out to the rest of Google’s data centers until after the holidays. He says that while Google could have rolled the update out faster, they didn’t want to upset webmasters by releasing it before the holidays. This is something that happened in the past when Google released its infamous Florida update before the holidays, causing rankings to drastically change. Cutts says not to panic.
Filed under Breaking News by on Sep 15th, 2010.
- Image via CrunchBase
Chris Crum reports again that Google is always changing their algorithms… No surprise there.
Algorithm Changes, Experiments, and Acquisitions
There are currently some interesting happenings with Google search that webmasters may want to pay attention to. The company, which is always busy, has been making moves, which may greatly affect its flagship product – search. This is all in addition to everything the company is doing in social media, mobile, gaming, advertising and everything else (which all may have their own separate impacts on search).
Have you noticed recent changes in your ranking?
Algorithm Change
Google makes changes to its algorithm all the time, but when a change comes with an announcement, you know people are going to talk. On Friday, Google announced a tweak designed to surface multiple pages from a single site for relevant queries.
“For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site,” says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. “Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History‘s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results.”
Google is trying to think like the user more and more all the time… Maybe we should too!
Filed under Breaking News by on Aug 25th, 2010.
- Image by Carlo Nicora via Flickr
By Doug Caverly
Even with its 500 million users and omnipresence in society, Facebook is not discounting the threat posed by Google‘s supposed plans to launch a social network, according to a new report. Instead, the company’s gone into a sort of “lockdown” in response.
Do you think the lockdown’s a sign that Facebook thinks it’s in trouble? Or just a way of accomplishing some extra work?
Anthony Ha reported, “We’ve heard from a source close to Facebook’s plans that the social network is working hard to fend off Google. Specifically, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has declared that the company is on ‘lockdown’ for the next 60 days, with the office open on weekends as the company tries to revamp Photos, Groups, and Events in advance of the Google launch.”
Then Ha added, “We hear Zuckerberg even has a neon sign saying ‘Lockdown’ on his office door.”
That last detail makes it sound like Zuckerberg isn’t exactly sweating bullets; most people wouldn’t order neon signs under those circumstances.
Still, if what Ha heard is true, it could be a signal that Zuckerberg at least feels a reworking of his site is in order if Facebook is to stay dominant. And if an earlier report that Facebook has Google’s social product plans in its possession is accurate, that may mean Google has something very interesting on the way.
Of course, Google still hasn’t shared any details with the public about what it’s planning.
Filed under Breaking News, SEO News by on Aug 17th, 2010.
- Image via CrunchBase
According to a report released by Barracuda Labs, Google has twice as much malware than Bing, Yahoo, and Twitter put together. The study was conducted across these web properties over a two-month period.
Barracuda says it reviewed over 25,000 trending topics and nearly 5.5 million search results, analyzing them to identify the types of topics used by malware distributors. Barracuda lists the following as highlights from its findings:
- Overall, Google takes the crown for malware distribution — turning up more than twice the amount of malware as Bing, Twitter and Yahoo! combined when searches on popular trending topics were performed. Google presents at 69 percent; Yahoo! at 18 percent; Bing at 12 percent; and Twitter at one percent.
- The average amount of time for a trending topic to appear on one of the major search engines after appearing on Twitter varies tremendously: 1.2 days for Google, 4.3 days for Bing, and 4.8 days for Yahoo!
- Over half of the malware found was between the hours of 4:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. GMT.
- The top 10 terms used by malware distributors include the name of a NFL player, three actresses, a Playboy Playmate and a college student who faked his way into Harvard.
- In general, activity is increasing on Twitter: more users are coming online; True Twitter Users are tweeting more often, and even casual users are becoming more active. As users become more active, the malicious activity also increases.
- Only 28.87 percent of Twitter users are actual True Twitter Users.
- Half of Twitter users tweet less than once a day, yet one in 10 users tweet five or more times a day and 30 percent of Twitter accounts have never tweeted.
- One in every eight Twitter users has at least 10 times more followers than they are following.
- Only one in 10 users is following more than 100 users, and almost half are following less than five.
- The Twitter Crime Rate for the first half of 2010 was 1.67 percent.
“Our study shows that attackers have serious efforts devoted towards getting in front of the billions of eyeballs that are using search engines everyday and the millions of users that are connecting on social networks like Twitter,” said Dr. Paul Judge, chief research officer and VP at Barracuda Networks. “Therefore, we continue to analyze their approaches and build new techniques to find them and protect users.”
NetworkWorld points to some market share numbers, which seem to mirror the malware percentages presented by Barracuda.
Filed under Breaking News by on Aug 3rd, 2010.
