Twitter Profile - A whole new you, in your Twitter profile.

I agree with the new design feeling a bit heavy. Part of the beauty of Twitter historically has been it's laser focus on content and the real-time nature of conversations. While the new layout is nice from a design standpoint, I think it distracts from this core essence of Twitter in an effort to make the product more accessible to larger numbers of people. It could end up working for them as a business, but the risk is that you dilute the product's magic.

Twitter and Facebook seem to converge more every year. Facebook added public feeds and following. Twitter added photos w/ tagging. Etc... It's a bit early for me to have a strong opinion but it feels very heavy to me. I primarily use Twitter through Tweetdeck and Buffer anyway though.

As with all changes, definitely give it some time so that the default "oh no it's different!!" effect wears off. I've been using the new profiles for a while and while I was skeptical at first, going back to the old profile definitely feels like a step backwards. People have been asking for the "tweets without replies" view forever (it was previously something that only some verified accounts got). To me that's the best thing about the new profiles--it's much easier to scan a person's tweets when it doesn't have all of the replies. This should be a place that allows you to get a person's style/personality at a glance... it's function is very different from the timeline which is all about density and the stream.

DIsclaimer: I am now an ex-employee :) It's a logical move - web profiles are a gateway for a lot of first time visitors to Twitter, so they need to find ways to make it a "hook" to get them to understand and engage with the service faster. IMO, I've felt that Twitter's profile pages, up until now, have served more function for the owner, and this is a step to change that. Given recent moves, they will probably experiment and iterate on this to find what works best.

Inevitably, people fight change. :) Not that Twitter should have done this but I like how Snapchat rolled out it's 1.6 update, "hiding" new features (smart filters, photo filters, new fonts) in its settings menu. They didn't force the change on their users, they had to manually enable them. Furthermore, these new feature inspired people to spread the word, as they saw new photo filters from their friends. I wrote about this on FastCo shortly after its launch in Is The New Snapchat Brilliant Or Totally Boneheaded?.

Sidebar: anyone ever feel these 'update announcements' created a bad experience for current users who don't get the update for (in some cases) weeks? FB did this a lot, Google's done it here and there, and less so with Twitter. I know it's probably the right way to do it, but it also has a "we'll get to you soon" vibe.

It's a novel approach (which Twitter has done in past redesigns), but there are also drawbacks to that type of rollout: 1. Technical debt - A service on the scale of Twitter, where code is constantly being committed across multiple teams, will have maintain two separate codepaths. 2. Operational debt - From a customer support perspective, they'll have to address questions for new and old usage patterns, and be able to identify the differences. 3. Early-adopter / power-user bias - The people who are going to opt-in aren't necessarily the people you want to experiment with and get feedback from. 4. Delaying desired outcomes - If you already know you want people to use your product a certain way, why beat around the bush? (this is the most important point for me)

Like the full-width header image. But moving away from a minimalistic layout to a bulkier one is a slight disappointment! But, as always we'll get used to it for its a fabulous communication tool!

@eddie Indeed! I hadn't even thought much about #2, and we run a rather large support effort that I'd imagine is dwarfed by Twitter's - that'd be a real challenge. I've always thought the 'please update soon and by choice' rollout felt better on these big, frequent use platforms - Apple's iOS updates come to mind, and in a few cases there were 'hacks' to update your G+ / Facebook experiences as they rolled out. Not to ever underestimate how challenging these updates are at the scale these guys face.

Maybe it's just how I use Twitter, but I tend to discover content first and people second. So for me, any change to a person's profile page, would give me little to no benefit as I'm not actively trying to browse them. With this change, will you guys be pushing people's profiles more? Will it be more of a focal point for the UX?