Is the New Twitter Homepage a Mistake?

Is the New Twitter Homepage a Mistake? July 29, 2009

Posted by Todd Zeigler in Twitter, Website review

I’m definitely late to this party, but yesterday Twitter launched a new design for its homepage. This is the version of the homepage users who are not logged in and who are visiting the site for the first time will see.

Lots of smart people have already surrounded this topic, so I won’t write a long drawn out post about it, but I did want to share a few quick thoughts.

To state the obvious, the new site emphasizes search and trend tracking, and de-emphasizes orienting users new to the service and Twitter’s social components. It looks like the homepage for a search engine. This strikes me as a mistake. While I certainly use Twitter trends and search, the main reason I use Twitter is for the community of people I follow and who follow me. This aspect of the service gets lost with this homepage. Perhaps more importantly, the new page doesn’t do a good job of explaining what Twitter is – it assumes you already know.

In addition, the heavy highlighting of trends on the homepage will further encourage people to spam Twitter, or, more legitimately, to manufacture memes so that they appear on this main page. The obsession people have with becoming a trending topic will increase dramatically I would think. I’m not sure this is a positive development for Twitter.

What do you think?

9 comment(s)

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+1 links for 2009-07-31 « A little Jack with that? - July 31st, 2009 at 7:38 am
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Comments

-1 Carl - July 29th, 2009 at 10:32 pm

We debated ths yesterday and had some of the exact same thoughts.

Undoubtedly a way to show people into the stream before they have signed up for a profile. But it doesn’t explain what twitter does as it’s core prop or why it’s good for me.

Interesting live test maybe?
Bill - July 30th, 2009 at 9:29 am

I think this is hubris. It shows that the Twitter folks think they are already a full on platform that everyone knows about and needs to search as opposed to a service. That may be where they get but I don’t think they are there yet.
Sarah Worsham - July 30th, 2009 at 11:08 am

I run into people all the time that don’t understand Twitter – what it is or how to use it. Their homepage should focus on that instead of what’s trending (which would be more important once a visitor has actually signed up). Focusing on what’s important to new users first seems like basic usability stuff.
Ryan Roberts - July 31st, 2009 at 4:10 am

I don’t think it’s a mistake. Isn’t it something like 60% of people signing up to Twitter never come back? It’s a very high figure whatever it is.

The problem Twitter face is convincing people to stay and build up their profile, until they start following people and getting followers it’s next to useless and this probably puts off many people.

By using the homepage to show the vast scale of conversation and trend discussion happening on Twitter they reveal to new visitors what they could be involved with and exactly what is going on. I don’t think this was clear enough before.
Mark Nutter - July 31st, 2009 at 9:04 am

I don’t think it’s a mistake at all. They understand where the true value of Twitter lies, and that’s in search. Just because it will encourage spammers to game the system isn’t a reason not to try to figure out how to leverage search. Google has to deal with more spammers and gamers than any other service out there but that hasn’t stopped them from becoming a huge company based on search.

Twitter really has a tiger by the tail here: a stream of the public consciousness which provides them better data about what’s currently popular than google could ever hope to. The trick is going to be providing the right tools to parse this data so people can consume it in useful ways.
+3 jeff - July 31st, 2009 at 9:06 am

twitter is lame and boring. there i said it.
Todd Zeigler - July 31st, 2009 at 9:08 am

@Ryan Roberts – I really think the lack of retention has more to do with the design of the site once users logged in, not the non-logged in page.

@Mark Nutter – I’m less worried about spam than having too many people focused on becoming trending topics instead of just tweeting more naturally. Of course, the easy solution to that is to simply unfollow people using Twitter overtly for marketing.

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