Twitter's New Look??

As you probably know, the Twitter main page, http://twitter.com/, has changed. If you’re an existing Twitter user, you’ll need to sign out to see it. I don’t claim to have seen all the blog posts, and I certainly haven’t been tracking all of the tweets about it, but I have some definite opinions about it.

The good: first of all, it is visually very appealing. It’s an attractive mix of blue colors with a green “Sign Up Now” button. Second, it displays the trending topics by “Right Now”, “Today”, and “This Week”. And I think the slogan, “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world” captures the essence of the Twitter experience for someone new to the platform. In short, I think it’s a good way to attract users.

The bad: a prominent search bar, as with Google, Bing, Wolfram|Alpha and many others, implies to me a research tool. Of course, I am a researcher, so that may be my personal bias. As the page stands now, it is almost useless as a research tool. Composing a Twitter search query is different from composing a Google query or a Wolfram|Alpha query. This would be very easy to fix — just add a link to the “Advanced Search” functionality for query composition, preferably a large “Help With Search” button for the newbies.

Ritu B. Pant posted an interesting opinion, titled “Why Twitter’s New Design Totally Misses the Mark” (http://bit.ly/zxMwL). Ritu’s opinion is that Twitter is about networking, not search. And I certainly agree with him on that. If it is about search, there would need to be a query help button as I noted above.

Still, Carri Bugbee (http://twitter.com/CarriBugbee, http://bigdealpr.com) notes that “I’d say Twitter’s new look reflects its future monetization. They can’t make $$ from networking unless they charge users.” This is true as well, although I’m wondering what the business model would be. Twitter search as it’s implemented now, regardless of how you execute the search, gives you a just a page of tweets. Would there be paid advertising on the page like a Google search?

I personally think the value of Twitter lies in the business intelligence one can extract from the public tweet stream. Twitter provides a low-frequency sample — about 20,000 tweets per hour at present — of the full timeline via the public “spritzer” streaming API. I’ve got a collector running on this stream to provide input data for SMART@znmeb testing.

Higher-frequency samples are available, but Twitter has said, essentially, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you” about access to them. In short, Twitter owns the raw data and is in position to partner with vendors of sophisticated business intelligence tools: Extract/Transform/Load (ETL), database management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), competitive analysis, text analytics, and many more.

I believe the revenue from such partnerships would easily fund the platform infrastructure, and possibly even sophisticated Twitter clients for community managers and others who want to use Twitter for networking.

So: jump in — comments are now open!