Twitter revamps website as usage soars

"A new bird, a new experience, a new twitter.com starts rolling out today," Twitter co-founder Evan Williams said as he unveiled the overhauled website at a hastily called press event at the firm's headquarters in downtown San Francisco.

"It's an easier and richer experience, and a better way to discover what is new in your world."

An information pane was added to the right of the timeline of "tweets" that has long been a mainstay on Twitter profile pages.

Twitter users can see pictures, videos, and other detailed information from any particular micro-message quickly in the side-panel without having to navigate away from the timeline showing the ongoing stream of tweets from people they have signed on to follow.

"This lets you drill down and get more information without ever losing your timeline," Williams said.

"It makes it such a richer and faster experience. No more clicking away from the page. You get instant loading of pictures, playable videos, you can see more of conversations in context."

The overhaul, which was code named "Phoenix" in keeping with Twitter engineers naming internal projects after birds, will be rolled out gradually in the United States and eventually extended to all of the service's 160 million users worldwide, according to product manager Kevin Cheng.

"We are going to take it easy to insure the stability," Cheng said of the global rollout of the new Twitter page. "We are not going to give it a time frame; just watch how it goes."

About 370,000 people are signing up daily for Twitter, and users fire off more than 90 million tweets each day, according to Williams.

"As you can see, it is going off the charts," Williams said. "We've been focusing a lot on infrastructure, performance and reliability. The growth curve is obviously not easy to handle."

Source: AFP