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A ROUND-UP OF THE LATEST NEWS IN THE DIGITAL WORLD
TWITTER GETS A FRESH NEST
TWITTER has revealed the biggest redesign of its desktop home page for years.
The new Twitter.com is, they say, faster, easier to navigate, and more personal than ever before.
You may or may not see it yet, as it’s “rolling out this week”, but when you do you will be pleasantly surprised – they seem to have pulled off the trick of presenting more, without making it look a mess. It seems fairly straightforward and instantly familiar.
That’s largely because it takes many of its cues from the mobile app that most of us will be familiar with from iOS or Android.
There are tabs down the left to select the different areas of the service, a timeline of Tweets down the middle, and search and trends on the right. The new tabs on the left make it much easier to access bookmarks and lists, which are two useful features that a lot of people didn’t use because they were harder to find.
Twitter has also brought the “explore” tab into the navigation list, so it’s easier to dive deeper into trends and moments than ever before.
Mercifully, it’s also now a lot easier to switch accounts on desktop – you no longer have to log out and back in with another account. This, again, is very like how it works on mobile apps.
The other change – which again is most welcome – is also taken directly from the mobile app. You can now hit a button at the top of your timeline to revert the view to a simple chronological list of tweets, displayed in reverse order with the most recent first. Like on mobile, this view will skip back to the Home view after a while, showing the tweets Twitter thinks are the most important. I wish you could turn that off forever. You can also select from several colourful themes, and you can switch on dark mode.
It’s a solid upgrade, making the stuff you want to read a little easier to find, and adding some features that you already know and love from the mobile app.