• by John Capone , September 14, 2010

The change it had to come: Twitter unveiled its first major redesign to twitter.com late Tuesday, to an apparently quite large beta group. Eventually, says the service, all users will have the new interface. And it's one that is far more welcoming (even for those who just like to watch).

In a blog post introducing the changes, Twitter founder Evan Williams wrote: "We've learned something since starting Twitter -- life doesn't always fit into 140 characters or less." No, the service hasn't abandoned its famous constraint, but the gist is that the interface is offering you more information about each post (such as a full profile and stream of recent activity that pops up when you click on another user's account, or a sidebar of geographic information) without your having to leave the page.

And that is the name of the game in the streamlined and cleaned-up redesign. Tabs now allow a user to navigate various qualifications such as searches, lists, mentions of a user's Twitter name, etc. much more easily than the old method, which involved clicking off to other pages. Media, through partnerships with the likes of Flickr, Twitpic, UStream, Vimeo and YouTube and others, can be embedded.

The new Twitter greets users with a well-thought-out palette of in-page options. Unlike the old Twitter, which seemed more like it was designed to look OK on a Nokia feature flip phone.

HooteSuite, Tweetdeck, Seesmic and other third-party clients for Twitter have built followings, perhaps undermining traffic to Twitter.com. In addition, HootSuite recently announced a full Omniture-integrated analytics suite for Twitter (which it says will expand to other social media). Similarly, Seesmic has expanded its Twitter client into mission control for real-time media.

According to Forrester analyst Augie Ray, the redesign and subsequent iterations bode well for Twitter's growth (and he adds, its use for "influence marketing"), but not for all the obvious reasons. Casual users may be more inclined to use the more well-developed interface, yes, but so too will what Ray calls "spectators" -- those who are content to follow along and not participate. These are not power users, but casual observers who will only ever use Twitter.com.

"Improving consumption of Twitter-based content is important not just for Twitter, but for interactive marketers as well. The media can sometimes focus on how Twitter's growth will be limited by the number of people who are inclined to tweet," he reasons in a blog post.

And, as if to suport this lean back propostion, the new Twitter doe not care about you. It's not nagging you with a giant "What's happening?" Though it's there, and omnipresent in a small pencil icon that sits in the toolbar at the top of the screen now.

But you can't make everyone happy, can you? One user posted, after trying the new Twitter: "Shame the #newtwitter is just the emperor's new clothes. It's still @Twitter! It's still primitive, and still full of spam, banality & tedum."

So, no, the new Twitter will not make your friends any more interesting or attractive -- but it's still a big improvement over its predecessor. And in this way Twitter is following the example set by Facebook. Get the idea out there, in the most simple way possible -- then bring on the developers to make it pretty and functional. Worked for them.