Yesterday, Twitter announced it would be rolling out “.” The new profile has already showed up for a handful of users. If you open a new account, you’ll automatically have the new profile. Everyone else should get it in the next few weeks. (Rumor is this month.) Here’s First Lady Michelle Obama’s new profile:
In addition to being much more visual, the new profile will offer a variety of features to help users highlight and manage their content:
Best Tweets
Best Tweets will be your Tweets that receive the most engagement, and appear slightly larger in feed. Here is an example from :
I’d love to know the weighting algorithm for best Tweets. Will favorites, RTs, and replies be weighted the same in calculating ‘best’? Is there a set time frame for Tweets to be included in the larger-displayed, best category? Will “best” Tweets appear on home feed scroll? Can you “un-best” a Tweet without deleting it? Will other people’s Tweets appear “bested” in your feed if they were their best Tweets and you retweeted them? I’m interested to see how this plays out and what response it gets once new profiles are widely in use.
Pinned Tweets
Pinned Tweets will rip a page from Facebook and allow you to “pin” a Tweet to the top of your profile page.
On one hand, I don’t like the ability to pin Tweets. I think it takes away from what makes Twitter great — that it’s fast-moving, transient content. On the other hand, I could see this potentially being positive for brands and other organizations campaigning for new followers. I wonder how pinned Tweets will impact promoted Tweet earnings, if at all… I’m also curious to know if you will have to manually pin and un-pin or if content will fall off of being pinned after a set period of time, like Facebook. It doesn’t look like there are time restraints, at least in terms of how old a pin-able Tweet can be, because Channing Tatum has content pinned from February 9. I also wonder if promoted content will automatically be pinned.
Filtered Tweets
Filtered Tweets will allow users to view other user’s profiles using various filtering options: Tweets, Tweets with photos/videos, or Tweets and replies.
This is definitely the feature I am most excited about. Verified accounts have given viewers the ability to sort between Tweets and replies for a long time. I’ve always wanted it when I go check out a new person to potentially follow and have to wade through a sea of conversations with friends to find content I might actually see in my home feed. I’m not sure I can see the benefit in sorting Tweets with visual or multimedia content, though. Looking at the accounts that have already changed over, it doesn’t look like they are getting rid of the multimedia preview section in the left bar, so why do we need to sort in-feed, too?
Bonus Features Twitter Did Not Mention In Their Blog Announcement
A second, static bar
Based on the accounts that already have new profiles, it looks like Twitter is adding a second, static bar with account stats and the ability to follow under the current ‘home, notifications, discover, me’ bar. I think this is a little sloppy-looking, but overall a nice feature because you will no longer have to scroll all the way back up to the top of the page to follow an account.
It also looks like number of photos/videos and number Tweets a user has favorited are going to become a metric in the new, static stat bar. This seems odd to me. Why do either of those metrics matter? They won’t play into my decision making process to follow or not follow a user, and I can’t see them (especially number of favorites) being a metric worth reporting on the back end.
Accounts you follow
Accounts you follow will now be listed in feed on web scroll. In Channing Tatum’s feed, new accounts he follows are always listed two at a time. I’m curious to learn more about how this feature works. If you follow more than two, does it show the last two, two most influential (as probably ranked by secret algorithm), or something else?
One feature Twitter appears to still not be including with this update is the highest on my wishlist: sortable, searchable favoriting. I favorite content for many different reasons. I’d like to be able to sort them into lists like, “check this out later,” “things that made me laugh,” “OMG a celebrity replied to me,” etc. instead of having everything in one big, giant lump of hundreds of Tweets.
It will be interesting to see how this roll-out plays out. I don’t know many users who conduct the majority of their Twitter usage on web. I wonder if any of these features will make the jump from web to Twitter-owned apps like TweetDeck and the native Twitter apps for iOS and Android. If these features remain web-exclusive, I can’t see how they would really become game changers for branding and advertising. Individual profiles just don’t seem to get enough regular traffic for these features to matter to an outsider. Brands will still have to focus on great, 140-character content that will appear in follower home feeds.
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