Twitter has begun rolling out an update to users’ web profile pages that will make them look a lot more like Facebook’s. For now, only a select group of users have it, including the US First Lady, Michelle Obama and R&B Singer, John Legend.
This shiny new profile page looks to increase levels of engagements in three ways:
- emphasizing your most popular tweets, so your visitors don’t miss them;
- users can pin their favourite tweets to the top of their profile page and
- visitors can now choose between viewing all your tweets, viewing only tweets with attached media or tweets and their corresponding replies
All undoubtedly Facebook-inspired additions. The first two are inspired by the “Highlight” and Pin to top” functionalities available to Facebook Page Admins, while the last is inspired by Facebook News Feed Filters.
This is not coming as a surprise. Particularly since it went public, Twitter has been going through a lot of visual changes on both web and mobile. The most recent being Facebook-like photo upload functionalities for the Android and iPhone Apps.
Just last week, Twitter for web also began rendering emoticons/emoji, something Facebook already does. And there are reports that Twitter is seriously considering relegating @mentions and hashtags to the background; just another in the list of attempts to make Twitter more appealing to newcomers. I find the last one really weird because it is barely a year ago since Facebook began supporting hashtags, in a bid to be like Twitter.
Probably it’s now Twitter’s turn to feel insecure, or pressure is really mounting from older generation board members? Who knows. Mathew Ingram has a quite insightful article on exactly what Twitter might be going through.
