Twitter quietly launches new Timeline

News 27 Oct 2011

dan.goodswen

Twitter is quietly rolling out updates to their timeline, with select users already seeing changes.

Thanks to Patrick Bisch at Pinglio, we have screengrabs and video of the updates, which include threaded conversations, inline media and in-line listing of retweets.

There has been no official announcement on the Twitter blog or through other channels, yet select users have been seeing the new timeline for the past day or so.

Some of the change in functionality will be familiar to users of mobile clients such as Tweetbot, who already enjoy enhanced controls in the timeline.

By including media in the posts, and not the sidebar, the changes also allow Twitter to stay competitive with fellow microblogging site Tumblr, who have seen phenomenal growth over the past year due to the visual nature of the dashboard – Tumblr’s answer to the timeline/newsfeed.

These changes are long overdue, coming over a year after Twitter rolled out their last major redesign. Facebook have made several major updates since then, also allowing larger media to be displayed in the newsfeed.

You can see some of the updates below;

Inline conversations

Click a tweet to see the thread;

Inline Media

Photo and video will now display underneath a tweet, rather than in the sidebar. This means the media will be display at a larger size;

Profile Lightbox display

Rather than appear in the sidebar, when you click a user’s name their profile will now appear over the page in a lightbox, similar to how Facebook now displays photos;

While these seem like intuitive changes to the timeline, as Patrick points out, they also seem to make the sidebar – a major part of the redesign – rather obsolete.

Is this a move by Twitter to get users to spend more time in timeline? Certainly with their continuing push to bring in advertising revenue, it would make sense to ensure users are lingering for longer.

While we’re waiting for these updates to rollout to our accounts, we’d love to hear your thoughts – are you a fan? Do you have the update yet? Leave us a comment…