Twitter aims to increase traction with homepage revamp

by Stevie Smith - Jul 30 2009, 16:00

Not that Twitter’s ever-increasing market reach requires the momentum injection that usually accompanies an aesthetic revamp, but the popular micro-blogging network is giving its users a fresh-faced homepage all the same… just because.

Of course, not limited to just a shallow juggling of layout, design and colour in order to tempt yet more users, Twitter’s alterations have been implemented with a view to increasing the service’s overall accessibility for those duly captured first-time users.

“Helping people access Twitter in more relevant and useful ways upon first introduction lowers the barriers to accessing the value Twitter has to offer, and presents the service more consistently with how it has evolved,” explained Twitter founder Biz Stone in an official blog announcement.

Moreover, Twitter’s restyled presentation introduces a new real-time search tool and brings the existing Trending Topics feature to the front page, enabling users to instantly view leading Twitter topics being searched for by the minute or on a weekly and monthly basis.

Clearly looking to expand service usability from being a fairly basic 140-character messaging service created for friends, family and co-workers, Stone went on to say the new search function means Twitter “has moved from simple social networking into a new kind of communication and a valuable source of timely information.”

The newly refreshed homepage suggests Twitter is keen to maintain its phenomenal market rise by enhancing available services to better compete with the more wide-ranging features associated with other popular social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

The revamped homepage is possibly also Twitter’s attempt to keep initial users coming back for more, something the service has struggled with despite a massive rise in traffic over the last 12 months.

A recent study carried out by the Harvard Business School revealed that only a small fraction of Twitter users actually continue ‘tweeting’ or ‘twittering’ once their initial curiosity has faded.

The study, which monitored the account activity of some 300,000 randomly selected Twitter users found that a mere 10 percent were responsible for the creation of more than 90 percent of the service’s posted content.

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