Twitter Launches New Homepage

This week, Twitter unveiled its latest homepage design tweak and it features a meatier assemblage of information compared to its previous layout. This makeover was apparently done with the intention of give first-time visitors a better understanding of the value Twitter can provide beyond its role as a status updater.
“All of our recent changes [...]

This week, Twitter unveiled its latest homepage design tweak and it features a meatier assemblage of information compared to its previous layout. This makeover was apparently done with the intention of give first-time visitors a better understanding of the value Twitter can provide beyond its role as a status updater.

“All of our recent changes embrace the notion that Twitter is not just for status updates anymore.” said Doug Bowman , a creative director at Twitter, via a blog post officially announcing the redesign . “It’s a network where information is exchanged and consumed at a rapid clip every second of the day. With so much being shared, we know that there’s something of value for everyone.”

You may remember last year when the microblogging service modified its homepage from a simple landing page for logging in and reworked it display the trending topics. It is also here where they introduced and aggregated search.twitter.com on a search text box out front to allow both users and non-users an insight into the trending topics.

These same elements are still present on the new design which is basically a smarter and more organic reorganization of last year’s layout. As you can from the screenshot the popular topics which used to be gauged and organized according to minute, day and week, has been unified into a single vertically scrolling bar in the center. Meanwhile, new additions include a list of celebrities and other public figures who use Twitter and Top Tweets which presents the popular tweets being posted in real-time.

“We’ll be monitoring the data on this homepage design, and how its effects ripple out to other areas. Expect us to continually try new ideas that help users more easily discover who and what they can find on Twitter, and how they can personalize and filter the stream of rapidly flowing information.” Bowman adds.

Is Page Load Time Going To Be More Important?

Every few years Google will go through a rather large and drastic algorithm tweak that leaves everyone in the industry running around and scrambling to try to fix any rankings their websites or their client’s websites might lose. There is a great deal of chatter in the industry lately that website load time is going [...]

Every few years Google will go through a rather large and drastic algorithm tweak that leaves everyone in the industry running around and scrambling to try to fix any rankings their websites or their client’s websites might lose. There is a great deal of chatter in the industry lately that website load time is going to be a large factor for website rankings. Matt Cutts from Google has said that as it will be important it will not be a major factor yet. Matt describes it in a little more detail in the video below:

Google’s ultimate continuous goal with or without any search engine updates is to increase the speed and efficiency of the search engines which is always a very important aspect of anything technical and online. You really can’t blame Google for wanting to make their search engines highly efficient and lighting quick. After all it is all about the user experience when it comes to using a search engine and if over time the results take longer and longer to appear people will eventually be turned off. Is the search engine optimization industry just getting paranoid? Maybe a little bit but at the end of the day it is still really important to have a very quick and efficient website regardless of what Google says will be a ranking factor.

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