• Twitter Is Testing An Expandable Timeline

    Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

    Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving... → Learn More

    pinglio_twitter3
    pinglio_twitter3

    Twitter is testing out new design changes which makes the main Twitter timeline expandable so that you can see media and related information right in the timeline instead of off to the side or clicking off to another page. We’ve gotten a couple of reports about this change, which only a few people are seeing, (and Twitter confirms it is a “small test”). Patrick Bisch of Pinglio blogged about the changes and even made a screencast (which you can watch below).

    The changes are subtle, but they manage to simplify an already simple service. You can “open” up a tweet to see how many people retweeted it, the threaded conversation related to that tweet, or related photos and videos. For instance, here is a screenshot of a reply tweet along with the original tweet. (Hat tip also to tipster Paul Dufour)

    You will notice that the star, retweet, and reply buttons have also been moved to the top right. And you can close the tweet to go back to the main timeline view. Many Twitter clients have long included inline media, and it is encouraging to see Twitter trying to figure out how to make it part of the official experience. Every time I have to click off to another page to see a picture or to figure out the context around a tweet is a waste of time (these clicks add up, especially if you spend as much time on Twitter as I do).

    You can get a sense of the new experience by watching the video below.


    Company: Twitter
    Website: twitter.com
    Launch Date: March 21, 2006
    Funding: $1.16B

    Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post updates 140 characters long. Twitter “is a real-time information network that connects [users] to the latest stories, ideas, opinions, and news.” The service can be accessed through a variety of methods, including Twitter’s website; text messaging; instant messaging; and third-party desktop, mobile, and web applications. Twitter is currently available in...

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