This afternoon, Twitter announced that it had officially, and secretly, filed documents to the S.E.C. in advance of its I.P.O. The company is worth billions upon billions of dollars, and its founders will become extremely rich sometime in the next year. But Twitter, as we experience it, is also set for a radical redesign sometime soon. The company’s finances are set to change; but its looks may be changing just as much.
Twitter has evolved, particularly over the past couple of years, from a simple, text-based service toward something richer and fuller: users can now embed everything from pictures to Vines to full-on mini-apps within their tweets. It’s like a stream gradually becoming a raging river. Twitter has transitioned from a technology company into a powerful media company in its own right.
What’s coming next is a more graphically intense Twitter that is marked by fundamental transformation of its core experience on mobile phones. Within the company, the decision has been to prioritize mobile over any other medium, including the Web, and it will see the most change the most rapidly. Internally, the way the company thinks about apps has shifted: for a time, its philosophy was that its apps should feel as similar as possible across every platform. A couple of years ago, Twitter employees—including Jack Dorsey—frequently invoked “consistency.” In other words, Twitter wanted its iPhone app to look and work like its Android app. But now the company has come around to the idea that its apps should be custom designed for each and every platform, in order to take as much advantage as possible of what each one has to offer.
In less than a week, Apple will launch a radical redesign of its core software, iOS 7. The new software looks crisper and feels livelier, thanks to its extensive use of bright colors and wooshy animations. Twitter will follow iOS 7 with an initial, more iterative release. Then, sometime later, Twitter will unveil a new iPhone app that, like many other new apps, will match the iOS 7’s creative direction: it will look cleaner and feel more alive. For instance, in the redesigned app, according to a source, Twitter will dispense with its hallmark menu—four buttons at the bottom of the screen—which lets users toggle between different sections of the service: Home, Connect, Discover, and Me. Instead, users will swipe from stream to stream to stream. The streams themselves will be both airier and more immersive, consuming more of the screen; they will show more content and less interface. (A new version of its Android app just emerged which offers a taste of the new look.)
Intriguingly, the Discover tab, reported to be another Jack Dorsey innovation, which surfaces news and trending topics, will cease to exist. This portends other changes. For one, that Twitter has perhaps come up with a new, better way to show users content that they might be interested in. (It has been experimenting with a Twitter account that sends recommendations to users directly, among other things.) In this context, it’s worth noting a slight change that Twitter made recently. Most people noticed that Twitter started connecting the different tweets that make up a given conversation with a blue line. More subtly, while the main Twitter timeline had always been presented as a strict reverse chronology—that is, the very top of the stream is always the newest tweet—it now bumps older tweets up in the timeline in order to make conversations read smoothly. Previously, Discover was the only section of Twitter that didn’t present the newest stuff first—like Facebook’s Newsfeed, it showed you the most interesting stuff first, even if it was older. This raises a significant question: If Twitter is willing to alter the chronology of the main timeline for the purpose of conversations, what else would it change it for?
Another key point about the Discover section is that it currently shows full-blown photos, videos, and other embedded content directly in the stream; people have suspected for some time that the main Twitter timeline, which has remained text-only, might eventually look like Discover. With the evaporation of Discover in the forthcoming iOS app, as well as the shift to a more immersive stream that takes over the phone’s entire display, the stage finally seems set for that to happen, and for users to see photos, videos, and other media directly in the stream—much like Facebook’s Newsfeed.
It’s little coincidence that Facebook and Twitter continue to look and behave more and more alike in some arenas, with Twitter streams looking more like Facebook’s and Facebook attempting to make more of its content public, like Twitter: they’re both playing the same game for eyeballs and ad dollars. While the shift to a media-oriented Twitter is driven by a genuine desire within the company to produce what it thinks is a better service, it also presents a new set of possibilities for advertisers. Imagine the value for Oreo if users didn’t have to click on its tweet in order to see its revered Super Bowl Twitter ad but, rather, it was simply part of their stream. Deeply visual ads embedded directly in users’ stream seem much closer to television advertising—and will potentially generate a lot more revenue, which will only become more important following its I.P.O.
Twitter has other, more subtle threats to address, too. While Twitter countered Instagram with its acquisition of the video app Vine, it has done little so far to deal with the rise of more personal messaging services, like Snapchat and Whatsapp, even though it has one built into Twitter, called direct messaging. It would seem wise, in the course of re-designing what its apps look and feel like, for the company to give more weight to direct messages, which were buried as a user feature some two years ago.
Some people will hate the new Twitter. That lurking feeling that’s been part of using the service for the past couple of years—that what we have isn’t going to last—is finally going to come true, both in the product and the structure of Twitter as a company. But what’s coming is simply Twitter following through on promises both explicit and implicit: a Twitter that is at once simpler and richer. One hopes it’s also a better Twitter.
Above: Dick Costolo, the C.E.O. of Twitter, at TechCruch Disrupt, in San Francisco, on September 9. Photograph by Steve Jennings/Getty for TechCrunch.
An update clarified the timing of the app's release.
