Twitter updates user profile pages, looks closer to Facebook than ever

Sometime back, Twitter started rolling out a new lighter user interface for its web users and now, it has updated the profile pages of users. According to Twitter, the “new and improved web profile” page will help you tell about yourself in a better way.

The new profile design isn’t exactly your Facebook profile, but you can see that Facebook’s profile page is the inspiration for this change. In addition to the design changes, Twitter is also a bunch of features which includes

• Best Tweets: Your most engaging tweets ( more replies, more retweets or more favorited ) will appear in a bigger font than the other tweets.
• Pinned Tweet: Ability to pin only one tweet to the top of your tweets on the profile page
• Filtered Tweets: Ability to filter out content when checking our Timeline – Select from these options: Tweets, Tweets with photos/videos, or Tweets and replies.

The new profile page is currently available only to a small set of users and Twitter expects the design change to roll out gradually to everybody in the coming days. Twitter has also mentioned that if you are creating a new account in Twitter, you will directly start with the new profile design. So if you are still having an old design and are eager to check out the new design, you can just create new account to see the design change.

Twitter acquires Android Lockscreen app maker Cover

Twitter has acquired Cover, creators of Android lockscreen app Cover Lock Screen. The app was launched back in October last year and still remains in beta. It lets you set number of lockscreens for different context such as home, in the car, at work, and when you’re out that changes depending on time or location. The company has added a lot of features since it launch. It recently updated the app with boost and drop apps by long-pressing on individual app icons and improvements.
Acquiring the Android lockscreen app creators could mean that Twitter might also release a lockscreen app like Facebook Home. We can also expect something completely new from Twitter. Cover had raised $1.7 million in funding, notes TechCrunch. Both these companies did not disclose the final amount of the deal.
Commenting on joining Twitter, the creators of Cover on their official blog, said

It’s been an incredible journey, a journey that we’re excited to announce is taking a turn today as we bring the Cover team to Twitter to take these ideas even further. Twitter, like Cover, believes in the incredible potential of Android. They share our vision that smartphones can be a lot smarter — more useful and more contextual — and together we’re going to make that happen. We’ll be building upon a lot of what makes Cover great, and we’re thrilled to create something even better at Twitter.

Cover has promised that Lock Screen app will be available in the Play Store for now and they will let the users know regarding any updates or changes.

Twitter Goes Down For Almost An Hour

Twitter is down. I repeat, Twitter is down.

Twitter says that “most users are experiencing issues accessing Twitter on web and mobile apps. We’re looking into it.”

According to the API status page, Downforeveryoneorjustme.com, and tests within the TechCrunch staff, the service is experiencing some serious performance issues.

And it’s not just the desktop website that’s failing — Twitter for iPhone is down, as well as TweetDeck. We’ve confirmed that most activity out of Twitter, including the API and streams to third-party apps shut down right around 11am PST/2pm EST.

Users are experiencing issues with loading their timelines and posting tweets (which, it turns out, is more difficult to track without the help of Twitter). Unlike partial outages where certain features go down one at a time, Twitter currently shows no signs of life.

We just noticed the outage as of 2:00pm ET, and are reaching out to Twitter for more information.

Update 2:34pm: Things are working off and on.

Update 3:03pm: We seem to be back on track, but don’t be shocked to see things lag a bit.

Update 3:34pm: Twitter has posted the following statement on the matter:

During a planned deploy in one of our core services, we experienced unexpected complications that made Twitter unavailable for many users starting at 11:01am. We rolled back the change as soon as we identified the issue and began a controlled recovery to ensure stability of other parts of the service. The site was fully recovered by 11:47am PDT. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Developing…

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