attention industry — What 'New Twitter' is.

What ‘New Twitter’ is.

It isn’t an attack on power users, the same way Final Cut Pro X wasn’t a slap in the face to power users.

This is evidence of a core truth: no one changes the game focusing only on what power users want.

I don’t mean this as an extension of the ‘faster horses’ problem. I mean, simply, that your baseline experience shouldn’t be focused on what gets the power user excited. You don’t want to alienate them, but, let’s be honest, the intense power users weren’t using Twitter.com, or the Twitter iPhone / Android app anyway. So mostly, people are complaining that they aren’t the core target anymore.

New Twitter (or #newnewtwitter, depending on who you ask) is about redefining the experience to better align with the value proposition Twitter has been claiming for several years; that the service is about Discovery, or Serendipity, or Breaking News. And if you want to be the internet’s early warning system for everything, then yes, private message functions are going to be de-emphasized. Especially when you’ve had a little voice in your head forever saying ‘I have half a dozen apps that do the same thing, and given our deep integration into iOS, competing with iMessage seems dumb’.

But most important is the Discover (or #discover) tab. This is the first thing Twitter has launched that feels NEW in a long time. Breaking the massive firehose of data into Stories (organized by both hashtag and topic), Activity (adding even more of a social layer to the platform), Categories (aiding user discovery, which has always been an issue on Twitter) and even trends (which you can continue to totally ignore unless you’re involved in a current trending topic) is turning this churning mass of data with potential value, into a discernible discovery engine.

The Discover tab is Twitter becoming a relevant capital N news source, rather than a way of discovering what people you know, or know of, find relevant. This doesn’t replace any of what Twitter is and was, but it extends it. Twitter as news magazine also offers an important differentiator in terms of ways to access the platform - possibly enough of one that Twitter can own the access point again, and use that as a starting point for new revenue generators.

I’m not going to say the new Twitter layout is anywhere near perfect. In fact, I expect a large number of tweaks will be made, and soon. But I do think it actually offers a direction for the future of Twitter. Which, despite buzz, despite early adopter cred, and despite my power-user status (27,650 tweets and counting), isn’t actually about how me, and those like me, use the service.