Twitter has recently changed its home page. The new homepage highlights the twitter people’s effort to change their image and thus expand the Twitter user base.
New Home Page:
To what extent the changes in the new homepage will help twitter attract more users, only time will tell. But a small discussion on the changes and their possible impact will be quite interesting.
--The first change, which catches our eye, is of course the change in the colours in the homepage. Unlike the old homepage, the colours in the new homepage are bright. In addition the homepage looks more colourful now.
The small bird which used to sit on a branch, in the earlier homepage; is now seen flying up in the sky.
Inference: Twitter is asserting its popularity ,now in a visual manner. The colour changes and the flying bird point to a confident Twitter.
-- The old Homepage introduced Twitter as a means to connect with one’s busy friends, family and co-workers. Busy to the extent, that they might have only time to tell those who care or matter, what they are doing; after each couple of hours. The idea to sell was, no matter how busy you are, you can answer to a simple question, “What are you doing”. Those who care and matter, will be content with just the one line answers.
The new Homepage, on the other hand, wants the users to “share and discover what’s happening right now anywhere in the world”. Taking a cue from the popularity, Twitter trending topics have gained in the past one year, the new Homepage also shows recent, today and weekly trending topics at the lower half of the page. A search box is also added to the new homepage.
Inference: Twitter is consciously trying to shed its personal service tag. Rather than stressing on the community messaging aspect of the service, news and discussion is being stressed upon. Taking a cue from the popularity of the trending topics and the real-time search results; now Twitter wants to posture itself as a news breaker and best searcher. Hence an effort is being made to channel the users towards popular discussion topics.
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Leaving the colour changes on the homepage and the bird logo, for you to judge. Let us concentrate on the other changes. We feel that Twitter is trying to expand its user base at the cost of shedding the image that worked for it up to now. When Twitter was launched, people got attracted to it as it helped them communicate by means of small messages. In the meantime, the Twitter user base kept increasing and people started making more friends, and started sharing instantaneous information other than their personal information. Hence “what are you doing?” began including “Reading news about the Govt atrocity on the minorities” and so on. Seeing this communication, soon the marketers and companies came in. So what started as a community messaging service is now, a news, search and marketing universe.
But the important thing is, Twitter was (and is) foremost a community messaging service. Rest came out of this single virtue.
So Twitter’s bid to shed this virtue is hard on logic.
If trending topics and the real time search are important, then it should be kept in mind that they evolve, when people chose to answer a simple question on the first place. In addition, if trends are the things people folk for then what about the moonfruit, which made to the top of the trending topics list some time ago. The reason for it making to the top was the incentive given to users to use #moonfruit in their tweets and re-tweets. So it’s not that trends are always worth a follow.
If breaking news, is the thing people folk Twitter for, then how many among internet users have the time and enthusiasm to follow the Twitter all day.
It may be that Twitter has already reached its highest user base by now. And going by the limitation of the basic concept, it’ll be hard to rapidly expand the user base onwards. Hence any changes should revolve around the basic question, “What are you doing?” --------