Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Have a Custom Twitter Background? Keep an Eye on the New Changes

My RSS feed this morning has been buzzing with news about the big changes coming to Twitter's website. If you haven't already seen it, here's a video Twitter released accompanying the overhaul. But to save you some reading, here's a quick look at the major moves being made:
  • Visually, the new Twitter.com (especially the profile pages) will look a lot like the Twitter iPad app's layout, which has been highly acclaimed since its release.
  • The default avatar is being changed from the bird to an egg.
  • "More" no more: the "more" button is being scrapped, and now there will just be an endless stream of tweets.
  • Introduction of the mini-profile: You'll be able to utilize a mini-profile for things like bringing up information on a user in the timeline and following users. 
  • There will be a huge focus on multimedia support, with 16 partnerships planned. The companies named so far are YouTube, Flickr, Justin.TV, TwitPic, UStream, Vimeo, yfrog, TwitVid, Twitgoo, Plixi, Photozou, Kiva, DeviantART, Etsy, Kickstarter, and DailyBooth.
Did you notice how I didn't say anything about Twitter page dimensions? That's because I haven't heard anything either way about whether or not the box in the middle of the Twitter page (which can't be changed/formatted by users) will be adjusted.

This is an important piece of information for the thousands of Twitter users, myself included, who have custom backgrounds on their pages. If that main box gets moved or changed, there will be many unhappy Twitter users who will have to re-format their background images.

But like I said, I haven't heard that the Twitter page dimensions will be changed, I just haven't heard that they won't be changed. And if the box does get re-sized, you can expect to see a lot of users voicing their frustration 140 characters at a time.