There's blatant imitation, and then there's thoughtful strategy. At first blush, Twitter's new redesign - which debuted Tuesday morning on The Today Show - looks a bit like a Facebook rip-off. But if you take a closer look, you'll see it's also a pretty good business move.
It's true: Almost everything about Twitter's new profile design - from its horizontal cover photo to its photo-centric timeline - looks a whole lot like Facebook (see below). And that, says Gartner analyst Brian Blau, may be the point. As the world's largest social network, Facebook is the platform that most of the mainstream uses, and if one thing's for sure, it's that Twitter needs more traction with mainstream audiences.
It's part of a larger trend in the world of social networking services. As each one - from Twitter to Facebook to LinkedIn - seeks to be everything to everyone on the net, they're looking more and more like each other. There may be drawbacks to this sort of thing, but at this stage in Twitter's evolution, it makes perfect sense.
During its fourth-quarter earnings report earlier this year, Twitter revealed that although its user base was growing, its user engagement (that is, how much time users spent actually interacting with Twitter) was slowing down. It's a sign that even if people are testing out the platform, they're not sticking with it, and that could be because Twitter has traditionally looked and operated so differently from other social networks. 'People are intimidated by the open nature of Twitter. The redesign kind of looks like other networks, and that's what people are already used to and comfortable with,' Blau says. 'This direction might reduce that level of intimidation.'
The new design could also be an important first step toward fixing Twitter's firehose problem. Right now, unless you spend the whole day refreshing the page, you're always missing something on Twitter. And yet, there's no easy way to find out what you've missed. The constant stream of Tweets can be overwhelming even for seasoned users, but it can drive newcomers to Twitter away altogether. With the new design, the most popular Tweets will appear larger on users' profile pages, meaning new users will at least get some hint as to what the most important Tweets are. It may not solve the problem completely, but it's a start, and it's not hard to imagine that as Twitter continues to make a play for mainstream audiences, it could roll out more features that help users surf Twitter more easily.
That Twitter chose to break all of this news on The Today Show only seems to reinforce this new, consumer-friendly approach. Twitter has, traditionally, been far less public than Facebook about its announcements. When news breaks at Twitter, it's typically done in a blog post. By announcing on The Today Show, Twitter is not only publicly singing its own praises. It's doing so on a morning show that tends to be more popular with stay-at-home moms than with the typical tech crowd.
But the true brilliance here is that by unveiling the profile redesign - which will be rolled out to users in the coming weeks - Twitter may be able to appeal to new users without jeopardizing its existing base, as often happens when tech goes mainstream. That's because so many of Twitter's power users already bypass the profile page, and instead, manage their social media accounts through third-party apps like HootSuite.
Of course, if Twitter does succeed in becoming as user-friendly as Facebook, and becomes crowded with, as Blau put it, 'ads and grandparents,' it's possible, if not inevitable, that it will lose traction with some of its earliest devotees. And that's okay. 'It's the future users who will drive the business forward. They're the target for advertisers,' Blau says. 'They're different from the digerati and the people who flock to these networks early on. It's the mass market that has the buying power. That's what Twitter's really after.'
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