It's not uncommon for companies to redesign their pages. Thinks get stale, new features get added, whatever. People groan and moan about it for a week or two and then they get used to it. Such is the way of life on the Internet.
But I'm not sure I've seen any company so blatantly rip off another the way that Twitter just has.
The company announced on Tuesday that it is rolling out new profiles on the Web, which are meant to make them more personal to each user.
"Moment by moment, your Twitter profile shows the world who you are," the company wrote. "Starting today, it will be even easier (and, we think, more fun) to express yourself through a new and improved web profile."
The profiles now feature a larger profile picture, and give users the ability to customize their header, and the ability to show off their best Tweets.
Here is a picture of what the new profile looks like. Tell me if it looks familiar to you at all:
The customizable header, the placement of the profile picture, and the thumbnails of who each user is following on the right side, and the list of options below the header are an exact copy of the Facebook layout. Almost down to a tee.
So why do that? Well, the truth is that Twitter is a public company and it needs to appeal to the masses. It can't be a niche network anymore. With only 241 million total monthly active users (MAUs), Twitter could do worse than to copy the look of a company that has 1.23 billion MAUs. I mean, Facebook has got to be doing something right to get those kinds of numbers!
The new Twitter profiles do have a few features that set it apart from its rivals, though.
First, it will actually make those tweets that have been engaged with more, meaning liked or retweeted, slighly larger "so your best content is easy to find." The new profiles also contain a "pinned tweet," which allows users to put one of their older tweets at the top of the page, rather than just the most recent one.
And, finally, it gives users the ability to filter tweets by category when looking at other people's profiles. They can choose from Tweets, Tweets with photos/videos, or Tweets and replies.
So, if I go onto the First Lady's new profile, as pictured above, and then I click on photos/videos, this is what it looks like:
Honestly, its much better, and simpler, way to view the multimedia content that users put up. The old way was clunky and inelegant, to say the least.
This new profiles are becoming available today to a small group of users, including Zac Efron, Kerry Washington, Channing Tatum, and John Legend. The rest of us will be getting the new profiles in the coming weeks as they roll out to everyone.
(Image source: 500.co)
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.