Twitter Inc unveiled a redesign of its user profile pages on Tuesday, the latest in a series of steps promised by the company to bring new users to the seven-year-old service.<\/p>\n
In response to an all-time low in user growth figures during the recent quarter, Twitter Chief Executive Dick Costolo told worried Wall Street analysts that the company would make a number of changes to freshen up the service.<\/p>\n
Tuesday’s redesign, while mostly cosmetic, hinted at what Costolo described in February as a willingness to experiment with new ways to organize content. Users can now “pin” a tweet to stay at the top of their feed, a rare instance of Twitter departing from the continuously rolling format that has defined the service.<\/p>\n
Tweets that have received more retweets or replies will also appear slightly larger to spur more user engagement.<\/p>\n
The new layout, which will be available to a small group of users initially, will be widely deployed to Twitter’s 241 million users in the coming weeks, the company said.<\/p>\n
Twitter reported higher-than-expected fourth-quarter revenue on February 6, but investors focused on user growth of just 3.8 percent, the lowest rate of quarter-on-quarter growth since Twitter began disclosing user figures. The San Francisco-based company went public in November.<\/p>\n
In recent weeks, Twitter has also reportedly been testing a number of new advertising units, such as ads that include download links for mobile apps.<\/p>\n
As part of Tuesday’s refresh, Twitter said users will also be allowed to select a large banner picture to display across the top of their profile page, as well as a much larger profile picture, two features that resemble another social network familiar to most of the world’s Internet users: Facebook.<\/p>\n
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