Today, Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo announced a new design with a focus on profile pages and an iPad update on the TODAY Show, live. The show teased “big changes” coming to Twitter, and drew it out pretty well giving a company tour.
The company announced that there are over 140 million users, with 340 million tweets per day, currently. Twitter also has an $8 billion valuation, which is just massive, not to mention a whopping 900 employees in San Francisco alone.
At times, this felt like a commercial for Twitter, discussing the free snacks they get.
“Twitter brings you closer to the action and your heroes” said Costolo.
Here’s what the company had to say on its blog about the web update:
Starting today you can make your presence on Twitter more meaningful with new Twitter profiles. Upload an all-new header photo on mobile apps for iPad, iPhone and Android or twitter.com, and the same image will appear whenever anyone views your profile on the web or these apps. You can upload your header photo, which appears above your Tweets, to express yourself instantly, anywhere.
These big changes might explain the recent issue that the company had during its maintenance routine to fix photo uploads when verified accounts started getting random profile images in place of their own. Perhaps a little bug introduced in preparation?
With a push toward creating a place on the web to serve as your “home,” Twitter is getting down to the nitty gritty with Facebook to fight for your eyeballs and clicks.
If you want to upload your header photo, here you go:
Oh, btw, to upload a header photo:
Go here: twitter.com/settings/design
Scroll down to Header
Upload an image
Click "Save changes"
Celebrate
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Carolyn Penner (@cpen) September 18, 2012One advantage that Twitter has? The iPad update looks absolutely gorgeous:
Twitter for iOS and Android have also gotten a fairly decent update, including support for new profiles and photo streams. All mobile updates, as expected, have stripped out the ability to post images using third-party services.
We’ve known about Twitter’s appearance on the TODAY show since yesterday, but had no idea what would be discussed or announced.
The wait is almost over...10 minutes away MT @laurlens Burning up with excitement! What's the big #news #twitter @todayshow @twitter
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TODAY (@todayshow) September 18, 2012Good morning! @dickc is getting ready to talk Twitter on the @todayshow in the next few minutes. Time to change the channel to NBC.
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Twitter (@twitter) September 18, 2012The company didn’t let us down, as this is a fairly grand way to announce design changes. Oh, and don’t forget, these changes are to help brands engage, so the business model is in full effect here.
[Photo credit: Flickr]
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
Dick Costolo is the founder of Feedburner which was acquired by Google in 2007. He is currently the CEO of Twitter. He has also performed in Chicago’s Annoyance Theater and various improv shows and festivals.
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