Twitter’s New Website – Its 2 Best Features

Twitter’s website is in the process of rolling out a major redesign to all of its users. The redesign has a slew of changes, improvements and additions. I’m not going to bother covering every single one here, but instead mention the ones I really like.

The most noticeable change is that the screen is now organized into 2 panels. On the left is your timeline, which is switchable (via tabs) to your mentions, retweets, lists and searches. On the right is where you get a lot of meta info, such as user info, and even better the fully expanded tweets (including embedded media like photos and videos and even maps without having to click to another site). Twitter teamed up with a number of media sites to make this last feature happen.

The other feature I really like are the keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts are what makes me a faster Gmail, computer and application user, and it can make me a faster Twitter user too.

The question now is whether this new interface is going to obsolete many of those 3rd-party Twitter apps. I think the answer is yes. The top notch ones like Hootsuite, Seesmic, etc. will live on, because they still provide functionality that the Twitter.com site doesn’t provide, especially for power users.

To find out more and see additional screenshots, check out the video Twitter made (below), their page on the subject, Gina Trapani’s article and Techcrunch’s MG Siegler’s article.