Twitter has 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," writes 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.
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.
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