Dan Frommer weighs in with a positive view of Twitter’s more visual timeline in The Best Part Of Twitter’s New Design Is That It’s Experimenting In Public:
Love or hate Twitter’s new design features — I like the in-line photo and video previews, but the reply/fav/retweet icons under every tweet feel a little too noisy — they say one great thing about Twitter: That it’s not afraid to experiment boldly in public. […]
Remember: Twitter’s goal is to maintain its independence, and soon become a large, profitable, public media company. If Twitter can try new things — in public — that make its service easier to understand, easier to use, easier to monetize, and easier to grow, that’s a big victory for the company and its users.
The key point in Frommer’s analysis is what Twitter has become: a media company that makes money through advertising. This means that there needs to be a way to show ads more prominently, so that they can charge more for those ads. That places very specific constraints on how the product can be designed. If ads need more clicks, ads need more prominence. One way to give ads more prominence is to make them take over a larger part of the screen. So Twitter is testing one way of accomplishing that with their “more visual timeline”.
Of course, brands figured out pretty quickly that they can take up more of the screen if they add a photo to their links:
Contrast that with Tweetbot’s view of the same Co.Design tweet (and others):
I think what we’re forgetting is that Twitter has chosen their path. Sorry for repeating myself, but they’ve become a media company that makes money through advertising. For the foreseeable future, all product decisions will reflect that. This is where I disagree with Frommer. I don’t think this change makes the service easier to understand and easier to use. It does, however, make it easier to monetize, and easier to grow.
The bottom line is this. Don’t think for a minute that Twitter doesn’t realize that inline images hurt the user experience by reducing the scanability of tweets. Of course they know. But they don’t have a choice. They are now operating within the design constraints of the company they have chosen to become. If you don’t like it, buy Tweetbot before they hit their API limit.