This detailed review captures a pivotal moment in Twitter's evolution as the platform rolled out its major interface redesign to random users in September 2010. Patrick Bisch provides an insider's look at the new Twitter experience, having gained early access through the pinglio account while his personal account from 2008 was still waiting for the update. His immediate impression was positive: "I could easily get use to this."
The review systematically breaks down the new Twitter interface into user experience, look & feel, and features categories. The most important change was the introduction of a two-column layout, with the left column containing the timeline and the right column displaying detailed content about selected tweets. New features included organized tabs for Timeline, @Mentions, Retweets, and Searches, plus a tweet drafting button similar to the iPhone app. The features improvements were big: automatic refresh while scrolling, saved searches, enhanced tweet details showing retweets and replies, popup windows for direct messages, and improved navigation throughout the platform.
What makes this review specificly valuable is its documentation of Twitter's gradual rollout strategy and the author's balanced assessment of both improvements and areas still needing work. The inclusion of side-by-side comparison screenshots helps illustrate just how dramatically different the new interface looked compared to Twitter's original design, marking a major step in the platform's maturation from a simple microblogging service to a more sophisticated social media platform.
This 15-year-old review documents a very different Twitter than what we see today. The two-column layout described here would continue evolving through multiple redesigns, and many features mentioned as new innovations have since become standard across social media platforms. Reading this review today highlights how rapidly social media interfaces evolve and how platforms that once seemed permanent can undergo fundamental changes in their user experience, while also showing how user behaviors and expectations around social sharing have continuously evolved.
This summary was created by Dave Rogers. The original post was written by Patrick Bisch and published on September 1, 2010.
If you'd like to view the original post, you can find it here.