eKnowWaytions

Alright. Tonight twitter released it’s highly anticipated new homepage. Emphasis on HOMEpage. They just changed twitter.com – not your profile or anything else. But ok. Change has come. And, obviously, it was time to change it. To say it in marketing words: twitter.com was pretty much 1.0, now it became something different.

During the whole day I’ve seen a lot of blogposts, polls and tweets about the new design. Almost everybody loves the new twitter.com. And though it defenitly looks way cooler than before, I don’t think that the changes are all good. Why? Let me tell ya:

1. Just imagine you don’t know twitter. You’re a newbie. You just heard a lot of talking and thought “alright, tonight I gonna check this out…”. What do you think of twitter? The huge search field right at the centre? Yep. Right. “Just another search engine, or what?”. You might even try a search and then bookmark twitter in the same category as cuil, yahoo bing or whatever but you WILL NOT sign up – ’cause its just search… #fail!
2. Where’s the USP? As mentioned before people don’t know what twitter is about. We, as geeks, know that it’s about networking. Responding to people, getting to know nerds, freaks and funky guys and girls. But does the homepage tell you that? Nope, it doesn’t. The networking character is totally missing. #fail!

Sure, I completely understand that twitter is looking for a way to make money. Badly. And yep, I even read some articles some months ago where twitter was hyped and thought to be the next big search engine. Googlekiller (maybe compared with #fb) and so on…. But I don’t think that

• twitter simply can hit the search market and become the #1 search engine
• they would earn much money right from the start
• leaving the way you come from gets you closer to where you wanna go

So twitter, please don’t forget what it was all about. People! Increase the search? yes! promote it as powerful tool of twitter? for sure! but do not forget the people, the connections, the network.

So, am I completely nuts? Is it only me thinking this way? Is twitter.com simply awesome and I don’t get it? What do you think?

Related posts:

1. Awesome Twitter Stuff – Part I
2. SEO & Social Media: Social Search, Twitter Lists
3. How to Twitter & Facebook Fanpages
4. Twitter Apps iLike
5. Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-05-31

Tags: Twitter

This entry was posted on Mittwoch, Juli 29th, 2009 at 18:35. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.