Twitter rejigs layout, opens wide to swallow SLURRY OF ADS It's been five months since the Twitter blabbergasm rolled into town. And, now that it's a grown up company trading on Wall Street, the micro-blogging site needs to crawl its way into the black. To do that, Twitter has suddenly gone a sombre grey with a layout tweak that surely signals to tweeting fans that the site is about …
It matters for their shares on the stock market. If their user base flatlines, if they lose money or they don't make any money, their shares will dip and the current set of investors will get incredibly pissed off. They could easily sell their shares on to another company, kick up such a fuss that the board couldn't ignore them, or simply buy a controlling share in the company and run it how they want to - a hostile takeover. So it is important for Twitter to keep the investors happy.
Aha! Facebook disease 2.0.
"We're worth billions because our huge user base gets ads fired at them on our website."
"Er, most of your user base use your services via a mobile app and don't see them."
"Ah. Right. Sorry. Ahem: We're worth fuck-all because....."
Maybe they should charge the celebrities and companies that use twitter accounts a monthly fee to use them. Also anyone who has more than X (100?) friends on twitter who is using it a endorsement platform . If they are using and benefiting (financially or popularity) from the service, make them dam well pay for it.
I recently gave up Facebook (and find I do not miss it at all) - having given up one Social Media outlet it should be relatively easy to give up another. If Twitter fills my Tweetfeed with ads or peppers its default web-page with the same I'll find alternative methods of access or, stop using Twitter too.
They're nice-to-haves, once they stop being that, then I'll just stop using them...
...as I'd gotten fed up long ago with the clutter and bloat in Twitter's Web interface, after they started showing attached images inline with the tweets, and started shoehorning "sponsored" tweets into the timeline.
I won't speak for Windows or Linux users as I don't know if it's available for them, but if you're using OSX, the standalone Twitter app really is the way to go. It's clean, it's fast, I don't have to look at the image attachments unless I want to, and I don't see any of the "sponsored" crap.
Btw, just copped a peek at the new profile layout, and cripes, is it ever outta control. The hugely expanded masthead image area is a total waste of space, and the profile/avatar image is also way bigger than it needs to be. It's just way bigger than it needs to be, overall. I've seen a lot of users lately commenting on how much it reminds them of MySpace. Eurgh.
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