by B.J. Tolentino

Created on: September 16, 2010

In the fierce fight to grab its share of advertising dollars, Twitter has announced an overhaul to the whole Twitter.com experience. This major development is a surprise to many even as analysts and advertisers are awaiting for the much publicized full-blown launch of promoted tweets and promoted trends (or whatever the finish product looks like).  

Evan Williams (Twitter's CEO and co-founder) describes the new Twitter experience as a faster, easier and a richer experience - "You can now take a simple tweet and get more context and information in less time." Williams added that this major revamp in 4 years time is one of those, "big leaps forward".

    
Twitter also released a 2 minute YouTube video on how it will look like when it opens to the public. It will have two equal sized panes instead of the current one window with a small sidebar design. The left pane shows the stream of tweets while the right one is a much more detailed look at whatever tweet (contents) and profile that catches the user's interest. Evidently, Twitter's current limitation makes it less appealing to many users.

     
As everyone knows, social networking (at least for the social crowd) is about sharing content with friends and followers. In response, Evan Williams announced initial partnerships with 16 industry players revolving around video and photo sharing. He specifically mentioned such names as Twitpic and yfrog for photo sharing and video sharing sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and the live video streaming site Ustream. He plans to expand more partnerships with photo and video related sites for a while. This is a major, major step towards improving the the appeal of Twitter.

It isn't surprising to know that with the current setup, "more than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com itself." This is according to a Sysomos report detailing an in-depth look inside the Twitter world. It further reports that 85.3% of its users post one update per day. Twitter's current platform pales in comparison with third party viewing decks.

   
It is clear that with this revamp, Twitter is trying hard to entice users to spend more time inside Twitter.com. It wants more engagement too. That's what advertisers are also concern about. It is notable that the same Sysomos document found out that only 5% of Twitter users control 75% of all activity; and 32% of tweets made by the most active users are generated by bots. These are disturbing numbers for Twitter.

What is also clearer is how Twitter will in effect, demolish another batch of third party app developers...

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