Twitter Gives a New Look to User Profiles

Twitter began the rollout Tuesday of a new look for its profile pages that is meant to highlight each user's best tweets.

The redesign, which Twitter described in a blog post, is immediately available to new users and will be gradually rolled out to the rest of the social network's users around the world.

However, it only applies to the desktop version of Twitter, not the mobile version used by smartphones and tablets that is the principal way that people use the service.

The change is one of a series of modest steps by the company to combat the problem of slowing user growth. In February, the company said it had 241 million average monthly users in the fourth quarter, a slight increase from the previous quarter.

At that time, Twitter's chief executive, Dick Costolo, publicly acknowledged that the service was too hard to use and vowed to make 'a better Twitter.'

In this case, 'better' means more visual cues about what's important on the page.

Users can now put a large horizontal photo at the top of their page, much as they can on Facebook, in addition to the more traditional thumbnail headshot.

A user's most popular tweets will appear in bigger type than the rest, and people can pin their favorite tweet to the top of their profile page.

Visitors to a profile page will also get three options to view the tweets: original tweets, tweets plus replies to others, and tweets with photos or videos.

So far, Twitter isn't applying a similar organizing principle to its main feed, which is a fire hose of 140-character messages delivered in reverse chronological order with very little to distinguish the important from the trivial.

But the service has been recently adding new controls to its search results page to allow users to more easily find the kinds of tweets important to them. So a search for 'Apple' allows users to pull up accounts related to the tech company, as well as photos, videos and news. With a single click, tweets can be limited to those from people a user follows or from a certain geographic area.

Whether these and other recent improvements are enough to fire up user growth remains to be seen. The company will give its latest update on usage on April 29, when it releases first-quarter financial results.