I'll be straight up with yall. I love Twitter. I love the service. I love the idea. I love the people I know who work there. Plus they have a badass cafeteria. I just checked out the following video announcing the new Twitter.com interface. You gotta see this
I've been increasingly impressed with the native functionality of Twitter.com, so much so that I rarely use the multi-column Adobe AIR apps like Seesmic and Tweetdeck that used to define my stream-happy eXistenZ. I've come to relish the simple. On my mobile I use Twitter for iPhone, but I also use Twitter's own mobile site which offers some functionality the iPhone app doesn't (notably, the ability to toggle SMS updates for accounts you follow).
The video above shows an elegant navigation style and integration of media which we first saw in Twitter's native iPad app. Check this screenshot of Gina Trapani's recent tweet with a Flickr link on my iPad here:
Screenshot of Twitter for iPad showing cascading panels that allow for media viewing and tweet navigationYou'll actually see two below Gina's tweet, Tom Coates makes the same observation I'm making. I love the integration because it brings a level of Instapaper, Flipboard and Pulse into the main client I use on a continual (not daily, continual) basis: Twitter itself.
I'm glad to see this interface hitting Twitter.com. Perhaps we can start doing away with all this platform-specific app development and return to using that multi-OS, multi-device, multi-platform commons known as the Web.
Update Wednesday 15 Sept @ 12:56
A few more observations.
Downsides.
1) Inconsistent feature set across Twitter interfaces.
Specifically, Twitter for iPhone/iPad allow you to "quote" a tweet, adding commentary to your retweet, but the web interface still does not allow this, forcing you to manually cut and past or, as I often do, pull up the tweet on my iPhone and quote it from there.
2) New wider content area severely reduces profile page wallpaper branding
Look what they did to my beautiful background image!
Bigger avatar, but smaller wallpaper area
2) Change to the "Your Tweets, Retweeted" listing
I loved in #oldtwitter how you could view all of your tweets that had been retweeted and get a count all in one glance. This is very useful in terms of gauging the popularity of your content, and as a comic, I use this view on at least a weekly basis as I prep for shows.
#NewTwitter, on the other hand, is more lovely, yet forces you to click on each tweet to bring up the side pane exposing the number of retweets.
Upsides
1) really pretty single tweet pages
Isn't she lovely? Isn't she wonderful?2) Seriously, the web is the thing.
I already mentioned above how this new web interface is a lot like the iPad app and is a nice reminder that the Web is a perfectly good place to build rich experiences without spending hella time and money building for specific operating systems and platforms. Mashable agrees, writing in The New Twitter Is An Attack On All Desktop Apps
The new web interface effectively makes Twitter desktop clients irrelevant in the long run. Because what’s the point of downloading software and running Silverlight or Adobe Air to engage with Twitter when there’s a brand new, multimedia-rich Twitter experience waiting for you inside any browser?
And Gina Trapani, with a less over-the-top headline, goes on to show in great detail why this is the case.
Go web, it's your birthday! We gone tweet like it's your birthday!