Twitter’s Engineers Actively Working On A Twitter.com Redesign
Last Friday Twitter engineer Alex Payne (@al3x) tweeted, “If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)” All hell broke loose shortly after as the blogosphere erupted into a collective spazz, making wild assumptions based on Payne’s tweet.
At this point, it safe to assume that Twitter is in fact working on a new layout. How drastic this redesign will be is up for debate. It seems that their main goal is to welcome more users into using http://twitter.com/ instead of directing them towards third-party services such as TweetDeck, Seesmic and Tweetie.
The thing is Twitter’s API is good, almost too good. For that reason, developers have been able to market excellent third-party apps. In fact, Twitter’s API is so good that Payne was forced to embarrassingly admit that the new web layout “…is actually *built* on public API methods we’ve already given developers.” Up to now, this “third-party service” strategy has allowed Twitter to grow at the rate that it has, but it has also left them in the red. As it stands, cataloging over 50 million tweets per day is an expensive task. As Twitter’s user base continually grows, more and more users are choosing to use third-party apps instead of http://twitter.com/ to play with the service, which is awful news for investors as third-party services don’t generate any revenue for Twitter.
With that said, I must warn Twitter not to do anything too drastic. Look no further than the hundreds of Facebook groups that spawn up after a new site redesign is implemented. Users hate it when a new layout is forced on them. A drastic layout change could prove negative to Twitter’s current user base, but their are two sides to every coin. A new layout could also prove attractive to users who have up to now relied upon third-party services to check in.
Of course Twitter would like to minimize the risk associated with deploying a site redesign. It seems that the proper course of action would have been to purchase an already fully-developed and fully-tested third-party service (i.e. Seesmic Web) and implement it into Twitter’s own site (keep in mind that they have raised over $150 million in capital, so money is not an issue). Judging from Payne’s tweets though, they will not be doing this. I wish Twitter’s engineers the best of luck in completing this laborious task.
UPDATE: Alex Payne (@al3x) deleted his original tweet moments ago. Refer to the screen grab for evidence.
RELATED POSTS: