Review: Twitter Redesign is Subtle, yet Powerful

The popular social networking site Twitter has unveiled its new design, and I give it two thumbs-up.

The redesign changes are subtle and mostly cosmetic, but there is one back-end change that adds a lot of horsepower to the site, which handles millions of updates every day.

First, a few words to explain what Twitter is: it's like what Facebook would be, if Facebook were only status messages and private messages. It's a "micro-blogging" service that allows its users to post updates of 140 characters or less. You can follow others' "tweets" (Twitter's word for updates), grow a list of your own followers and send direct messages. Updates are done through Twitter's Web site, through text messages or through a variety of third-party services.

Now that that's out of the way, what are the major changes in Twitter's redesign?

From a user interface perspective, the biggest redesign change is moving the tabs to the side of the page, rather than keeping them on top of the Twitter timeline.

"We did this for a couple reasons," Twitter says on a Web page explaining the changes. "For one thing, it makes them larger targets and easier to access. But more importantly, it was an investment in the future. We plan to have more tabs, and we'd run out of room putting them along the top."

In terms of performance, Twitter updates now heavily rely on AJAX, a Web technology that allows part of a page to reload without requiring the whole page to reload. This means Twitter pages will refresh faster than they did before.

Colors have been changed to make it "lighter" and "prettier," which Twitter acknowledges may wreck some users' carefully chosen color schemes. However, the site has rolled out a new design customizer to make it easier to get things looking back the way they were.

One casualty of the redesign that you probably won't miss: the Archive tab. Didn't even notice it was gone, did you? That's because it just showed what was on your Twitter profile page anyway, so it was redundant. No tears shed here.

The star and reply icons are gone too, but not really - just hover your mouse over an update and they'll reappear. This seemingly small change actually goes a long way toward cleaning up the overall design.

The Twitter redesign is what a redesign should be for a popular social networking site - it's subtle yet powerful, it improves the user experience and it offers new tools to play with. The redesign does not completely overhaul the site, which would alienate many users who are resistant to change.