The Twitter machine has produced a new portal to welcome Twitter web viewers who are not logged into a Twitter account. This is a very sweeping re-design of the main page and incorporates several changes:
The overall view of the new homepage. Below we will break down each area for you.
Here is the search box we have gotten used to now and underneath it is a scrolling Trending Topics (and yes Justin Bieber is in there :-) ). If you hover on one of the trending topics it will stop scrolling and show a pop up box expounding on the TT. The week and month Trending Topics are no longer presented (or at least they are not marked as such).
Next on the page is a collection of See who’s here icons. Not sure what the criteria is for getting on here either but I am sure it is some algorithm of some type – especially after the heat they took early on for the Suggest User list. Better to be random as possible.
Moving around the screen counter-clockwise we come to another scrolling stream of what are called the Top Tweets and a link to View All of them. When you click on that you are taken to what looks like a user page and is in fact the user page for the account @toptweets Favorite feed.
Now this page makes a point in the Bio block to explain that:
Top Tweets algorithmically selects and retweets some of the most interesting tweets spreading across Twitter.
Again, random is probably good compared to picking – no human involvement or bias.
The final stop on the Twitter homepage review is in the upper right hand screen. It invites those new to Twitter to click on the bright gold Get Started Now button to start the sign up process.
Is that also a new star burst pattern behind the name Twitter as well?
