Earlier this week Twitter announced that a homepage redesign is coming to a browser near you.  The new design is built around a two column style, a look that is reminiscent of many Twitter apps for mobile devices.  On the left side resides your timeline of tweets.  The timeline features infinite scrolling, meaning you won’t have to click a “more” button to view older tweets.  @mentions, retweets, searches, and lists are housed directly above the timeline “creating a single, streamlined view on the left of the screen.”  And above all that sits the “what’s happening now” status bar.  On the right side you can view personal account information such as tweet count, your most recent tweet, your list of followers and who you are following, favorite tweets, the lists you are on, suggestions for who to follow, and the trending topics.  Along the very top of the site is the search bar and links for home, profile, messages, compose a new tweet, and account settings.

Other than showing your personal information, the right column is also used to present contextual info and embedded media from tweets.  When you click a tweet from your timeline, additional information related to the author and subject of the tweet shows up in the right column.  Twitter has teamed up with a bunch of social media sites (including DailyBooth, DeviantART, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, USTREAM, Vimeo, yfrog, and YouTube) so that when you click a person’s tweet in your timeline, an attached image or video will instantly appear in-line in the right column; no more clicking links and being forced to view media content in a separate portal.  And if a tweet is geotagged with a location, a miniturized map will show up in the column too.

Now don’t go too crazy.  The 140 character limit and all integral aspects of Twitter are staying the same.  This is purely a relaunch of the site design to make things more streamlined and accessable.  The new Twitter is currently being rolled out as a preview to limited number of users.  The redesign will be pushed out to all users “eventually.”  It shant be too long I presume.  Look after the break to watch an introductory video.

[Via TwitterBlog; NewTwitter]