Why the New Twitter sucks!
This morning I woke up to something unpleasant.
When I logged into twitter.com, instead of the message across the top of the page that I’d started ignoring about how the New Twitter is so great I saw this:
“You’re using an older version of Twitter that won’t be around for much longer.”
My first thought was “Noooooooooooooooooooooo! I hate the new twitter” In fact I tweeted exactly that! Turns out I’m not alone either! There are 23,400 hits for the search “new twitter sucks” on Google.
Now don’t get me wrong. I love trying new things and New Twitter sounded really cool. When it was announced and I couldn’t wait to use it.
Unfortunately, what I found was underwhelming. The design is overcomplicated and finding the information you want is not easy.
For starters, the bio no longer has clearly defined fields for name, location, address and bio. While I get that it might reduce load times, it’s really annoying to get the information you need. The same holds true for twitter lists. While twitter can be praised for giving us back bios instead of tweets in the following/follower listings, the person’s location is no longer immediately visible. You have to click through to each profile to view it and even then, as outlined above, it’s not easily readable.
Twitter has also relocated the Direct Messages tab to the top of the page and has renamed it Messages.
It seems like the links to the things you need are all over the place and the interface suffers from toolbar and button overload. It’s also not clear where the mutual following/follower information is going to go if they keep it at all. I don’t know about you but I liked it.
Overall, there are too many extra clicks and extra time required to use the new twitter and I don’t like it! What do you think? Is new twitter better than old twitter? Will twitter ignore us and force this annoying change on us like they took away the ability to see conversations your friends are having with others, something even facebook understands?
Share your thoughts in the comments below.
