Huge Changes On Twitter – Everything You Need To Know

For the first four or five years of the service Twitter was known for all it’s basic features and it didn’t really change all that much in terms of basic functionality. Over the last couple of weeks though Twitter have been sending out some pretty clear signals as to where they are heading with some new feature releases, acquisitions and their ad platform starting to emerge so the new service will look very different to the current site that we all know and love. Messing with the basic functionality of the site is risky for a service that is so successful based on it’s simplicity but for the most part Twitter seem to be approaching this in a very smart way and not messing too much with the main stream. It will be a delicate balancing act because you can see how annoyed users get with Old Twitter being taken away from them. Here is everything you need to know about the new direction Twitter are taking…

Changing Basic Functionality

Twitter are adding new functionality with an “activity stream” and this is all about bulking out your social graph and sharing more of what your friends are up to. Crucially Twitter don’t seem to be messing with the main stream and are providing this information in a separate tab. Twitter have a ton of information and they are about to start putting that to work and making people more discoverable. This new layer of social activity will help you find more relevant information from within your social graph and add a whole new dimension to Twitter. This is a very good thing in our opinion as discovery has always been a bit of a problem on Twitter.

Splitting The Streams Instagram Style

Anybody using Instagram will recognize these split streams and how good they are for discovering new content and seeing what your friends are up to. The @ mentions will now not only include people talking about you but also people favoriting your tweets, people retweeting you, people adding you to lists and new people who are following you. All of this new information is aimed at keeping you coming back and also to discover new people and engage with people within your friend’s social graph.

Big Changes Coming In All Apps

All of these changes are going to affect apps in a pretty big way as they will have to be re-designed to include all the new features and activity streams. Everything is pointing towards Twitter’s own apps like the recently acquired Tweetdeck starting to take over from the 3rd party apps and Twitter will be pushing that angle as they want to make sure they control as many of the eyeballs as possible.

What Do New Acquisitions Mean?

Twitter have been busy buying start ups in the last couple of weeks and they all seem to be about talent acquisitions where they acquire the engineering talent and work those products in to the core Twitter offering much in the same way as Facebook does. Bagcheck was their most recent acquisition and as their service helps you group different items of interest in to lists you can expect this to be worked in to the new activity streams within the next 3-6 months. Favorites have been on Twitter since the very start but very few people use them and Twitter could be looking for a new way for people to start making lists and curating content.

Media Within The Stream

Twitter’s latest move was to add their own photo up loader so as users don’t have to use third party apps and this is all about Twitter becoming more of a source of rich media. To be honest Twitter should have had this functionality a lot sooner and this is more a case of plugging the gaps rather than innovating in any great way. Expect more and more rich media to start coming to the stream just like you would see on Facebook.

New Ad Platforms Emerging

All of these changes are about helping the users have a better experience but the Ad platform and revenue models are playing a big part in these radical changes as well. Trying to add ads straight in to the plain old stream would be pretty tricky and could annoy users but by adding all these new features, expanding Twitter and filling it full of more media it means there is a lot more room for ads and they might not get noticed as much. The fact that twitter is starting to expand the social graph will also help advertisers in the same way Facebook does.

The Future Is Bright For Twitter

For months now we have been hearing the investors at Twitter and the founders saying that they were very excited about the future and the potential of the site and now we can see why. These are brilliant updates to the site and will lead to more social interaction and crucially the future of the site in terms of making money looks very bright. I really can’t see there being anything bad about these latest changes and I think the future looks extremely bright for Twitter now.