What is Twitter? Is it a social network? Is it a micro-blogging tool? Is it a breeding ground for breaking news stories? It’s actually all three, but Twitter recently unveiled its new homepage which focuses on one of the three. Search, hot trends, and popular topics are now afforded the biggest section of prime homepage territory.

Due to the amount of people who either stay logged in all day or send tweets via mobile devices, the Twitter homepage isn’t as important to the site as it may be. However, it’s still the landing page for all newbies, and also prime Web space for companies looking to exploit Twitter for its marketing capabilities.

Which is why Twitter has now decided to give its homepage a drastic makeover. At a stroke, it’s altered the front page of the site to welcome in new users and maybe give them more reason to stick around, and given advertisers a chance to see how their brand could be bandied about on the site.

Twitter is already massively popular, and it’s getting more popular every day. The range of people using the service is huge, from celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher, Stephen Fry, and Shaq, to businesses such as Dell, and Best Buy. But Twitter still isn’t mainstream in the way Facebook is.

The new Twitter homepage could give the site a huge mainstream boost. Gone is the “What are you doing?” tagline which only served to prompt a response of, “Why would anyone care?” The Twitter tagline now reads, “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” Which is more inclusive and more revealing of the nature of the site.

Search is now the order of the day, with a Google-style simple search bar positioned above the popular topics of the minute, day, and week. This pushes the idea of Twitter as a breaking news digest and also signals its intent to start making money from companies promoting their products on the site.

In the Twitter blog post announcing the new homepage, Biz Stone promises this is just the beginning, with more changes made in the future. It may not seem very important (and isn’t in the big scheme of things) but it suggests Twitter is evolving as a product. And interestingly, it’s the users who are pushing the direction of this evolution, with the company responding rather than leading from the front.

Related:

Entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 2:19 am under Internet, Opinion, Social Media, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
Stumble It!