Twitter announced today more tweaks will be coming to its traditionally sparse home page, in an effort to make it more dynamic and interesting, especially for non-Twitter users.
Dead center on the new page being tested is a real-time feed of “algorithmically-selected top tweets” intended to present a slice of what people talk about on Twitter and who’s doing the talking. As always, users can look to the horizontal bar of trending topics just below the search box to get a big picture of the current discussion on the microblogging site.
To the left of the top tweets feed is a “random” sampling of people using Twitter–celebrities, businesses, and maybe even ordinary users.
With the new changes, however, Twitter is declaring that it is not simply a microblogging site, but rather a complex for discussion and, more and more, an accurate indicator of the Web’s pulse:
“All of our recent changes embrace the notion that Twitter is not just for status updates anymore. It’s a network where information is exchanged and consumed at a rapid clip every second of the day,” writes Doug Bowman, Creative Director at Twitter. “With so much being shared, we know that there’s something of value for everyone. People who internalize the value of Twitter understand the power of this simple medium. But it hasn’t been easy to make that value transparent or obvious for curious folks coming to Twitter for the first time.”
Still being tested, the new home page is not live for everybody yet. Twitter will be monitoring it to see what works and what doesn’t and can be expected to continually tweak various aspects of the page.
