Tweaking the Twitter homepage
Twitter's homepage is a work-in-progress. Today, we're testing a new design that bubbles up more of the information flowing through Twitter. This builds on a series of changes starting last year when we redesigned the homepage to make search and trending topics …
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter’s entry page had already been recast in 2009 around search and trending topics, following an earlier round of front-page changes. The new test extends that approach by treating the homepage as a discovery surface rather than merely a gateway for people who already know whom to follow.
That matters for a service built around open browsing: Twitter has said people can read posts from friends, celebrities, companies and media outlets without a required relationship model. Its recent @cleveraccounts launch also shows it experimenting with ways to direct attention toward notable accounts.
First-order effects
- Homepage visitors are shown more of the activity flowing through Twitter before they have built a following list, giving Twitter a more active first encounter with the service.
- Twitter gains a test bed for determining whether a content-led front page improves discovery of accounts and topics.
Second-order effects
- Accounts and publishers that appear in the information surfaced on the homepage gain another route to audience discovery beyond follower relationships.
- Twitter’s search, trends and account-discovery features become more tightly connected at the entry point, increasing the importance of how the service organizes public activity.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Twitter’s growth interface shifts from a utility-style sign-in page toward a curated discovery layer, with the platform increasingly mediating which public conversations newcomers encounter first.
The trend: Social services are turning their public entry pages into discovery products that expose network activity before a visitor has established connections.