Reactions to Twitter Update Cool Down

Big changes have been in the works at Twitter. The flagship social media company has recently moved very quickly to assemble a team of beta testers for the latest Twitter update. This update, which bumps the current version a whole point to 5.0, is an across-the-board reworking of the interface users have got used to (read: learned to work around) over the last few years. The purpose of this wholesale revision seems to be a general streamlining of the interface that will leave Twitter better positioned as the social media app of choice for businesses and advertisers, as opposed to primarily being a vanity project for private individuals. Reactions to this latest Twitter update have been mixed, however, and ideas are already being floated for possible fixes to version 5.1.

If you own, manage, or are associated with an ambitious brand, a huge part of your job in the communications field is going to be branding via social networking. Facebook, Pinterest, and—perhaps especially—Twitter have become the sites of choice in modern advertising, where more efficient targeting of an audience has become the goal. What's nice about Twitter is that the recipients of your business updates will generally be people who signed up to follow you in the first place, marking them as potential buyers almost before you make your pitch.

All of this is for naught, however, if the app itself is so hard to work with that your customer base has abandoned the platform before you get to them. The latest Twitter update is an effort to move away from the traditionally frustrating interface that garnered complaints almost from the first. Bug fixes, memory allocation, and other corrections aimed at preventing crashes have been made, and to a very good effect, if the early buzz is to be believed. This might be the most important element of the entire Twitter update, since frequent crashing was perhaps the primary cause of frustration before.

Another, more visible, aspect of the latest Twitter update has been the successful embedding of certain types of media within the main line. That is, it's no longer necessary to click through to a tweet's main page to view a picture, though development of video has lagged—if, indeed, it's even on the agenda. In addition to this major change, the 5.0 Twitter update has reduced the size of the displayed font, streamlined the update feed, and generally shifted the design of the display to maximize the area taken up by the tweet itself, rather than larding up the display with a lot of buttons and fancy borders. Twitter's old color palette has been retained, however, and the cool blues and flat design will survive until at least the next big Twitter update.

An updated Twitter has implications far beyond the horizons of private users and the occasional celebrity gaffe. Twitter has risen in the last few years to become perhaps the premiere social network of the age. Where it concerns business, and most especially the communications effort for any major brand, Twitter is the star of the show. It's to be hoped that Twitter listens to the feedback it gets from the beta test group before a wide release.

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