A Bird In The Hand

Meet the new Twitter.The dual panel design no doubt will leave plenty of options for the placement of future advertising; a stable revenue stream is something the company has still not cracked.



Danny Sullivan in his review of the revamped design (incidentally code named "Phoenix" by Twitter engineers) notes the following improvements:

1) “Save This Search” Button & Filtering: The ability to save a search is made more noticable, and there are new filtering options, which I’ll explore more, further below.

2) Promoted Tweets: The ad-backed tweets, if available, continue to come above all other answers.

3) Top Tweets: Editorial picks from Twitter’s algorithm continue to be offered.

4) Most Recent Tweets: The latest results on your search topic. You can now also keep scrolling and scrolling to get more answers, which is nice.

5) People Results: Formerly called Name Results, and still including things that aren’t actually people, like companies, these now appear over to the right of the search results. You can drill down further into People Results matches by using either the “People” link in the filtering options at the top of the main search resutls or the “More people results” link directly.

During the media launch Twitter co-founder Evan Williams made the following claims:

 "A new bird, a new experience, a new twitter.com starts rolling out today,"

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

The main advantage of  the new format appears to be that users can view videos, pictures and detailed information from a micro-message quickly in the side-panel.

There is no longer the need to navigate away from the timeline showing the tweet stream from people you have chosen to follow.

Growth of Twitter shows no sign of abating with about 370,000 people signing up dailyand users firing off more than 90 million tweets each day, according to Williams.
 
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Instant Success Or A Distraction?

Google has further developed its search functionality which should reduce the time it takes to find what you are looking for by 2- 5 seconds.

Their web site explains the development:

"Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press “search.” Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way."





Some users may find this takes a bit of getting used to but overall it takes search in the right direction and this type of intuitive response should speed up our online activities.

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