Twitter Testing A New “People” Tab: All Your Social Graph Steroids In One Place
Since the launch of New Twitter in September, things have been pretty quiet on the new feature front. Yes, they're testing out a new analytics product, but in terms of features that the majority of end users will use …
Context & Ripple Effects
Since the New Twitter redesign shipped in September 2010, the company has been notably quiet on consumer-facing features — TechCrunch notes the main other experiment in flight is an analytics product, still unconfirmed. The People tab breaks that quiet by pulling the social graph's scattered surfaces (following, followers, suggestions) into a single destination inside the redesigned interface.
It matters because it is Twitter iterating on its own client rather than extending the API: the redesign period has been defined by consolidation of functionality into the first-party experience, and this test continues that direction.
First-order effects
- Users on New Twitter get one place to manage and browse their social graph instead of navigating separate lists and profile pages, cutting the steps between seeing who someone is and acting on it.
- The test keeps Twitter's own client, rather than third-party apps, as the surface where new social-graph features appear first.
Second-order effects
- Third-party Twitter clients whose core utility has been managing who to follow now compete against a native tab that ships with the default experience at zero switching cost.
- Concentrating social-graph browsing in-house gives Twitter direct visibility into how users traverse follows and suggestions — signal that feeds whichever discovery or analytics products come out of the current testing cycle.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, feature development migrates from the developer ecosystem into staged first-party experiments, making the official client the primary product and external apps increasingly dependent on whatever surface area Twitter chooses to leave exposed.
- A single consolidated graph view also lays groundwork for search- and discovery-oriented surfaces built on top of the same data, as platforms of this era have tended to do once the underlying connections are centralized.
The trend: Consumer platforms of 2010 are recomposing their interfaces around the social graph, shipping features through staged first-party tests that pull utility back from third-party clients.