Twitter Gets a Redesign, Brings in Brand Pages and More

Twitter Gets a Redesign, Brings in Brand Pages and More

As per a recent news update, Twitter is going to see a major redesign citing the upcoming brand pages for the various brands on Twitter. The new redesign seems to be very interesting which involves the complete revamp of the way we interact with others on the twittersphere. Yes! Twittersphere is evolving, and evolving for the good.

This major redesign and the brand pages feature comes in just a month after Google+ launched the brands feature. Maybe Twitter is gearing up for the upcoming social media war, already into it's cold stage. Closely spotting, Google+ seems not much a threat to any other social network than Twitter, which is currently rope-walking between the ends of a dreadful death and an epic success.

As the video depicts, the new re-design involves a greater emphasis on the @Mentions (@Connect in the video) and #hashtags (#Discover in the video). The current right sidebar that shows the who to follow and the trending hashtags has been shifted to the left. The design changes would also reflect upon the mobile versions and apps for specific mobile devices.

Brands will get specifically customizable pages of their own with many page-specific features like holding a tweet always on the top of other tweets, and showing the content of the photo/video attached to the top-tweet implicitly without the user taking any action.

I liked the overall design update. Would rather rate the design update an 8.5/10. Thumbs-up Twitter. Great job guys. Hope the UX update works equally great as it looks.

What do you think about the upcoming Twitter update? Drop me a tweet @ikartik90 on twitter. Till my next post, stay tuned. Cheers! :)

[Sources: Mashable & Twitter on Youtube]

Why This Kolaveri Di : Chartbuster Underdog [VIDEO]

Why This Kolaveri Di : Chartbuster Underdog [VIDEO]

Why This Kolaveri Di by Sony Music India on YouTube

"Why this kolaveri kolaveri kolaveri di..." These are the words from the underdog song from the upcoming Kollywood movie "Three" that has soared the heights of Internet celebration from nowhere in a matter of twelve days from it's release. The song that released on the 16th of November turned into a Social Media viral with over 8 million YouTube hits and over a million shares on facebook.

Google Plus : Should You Be Interested? [Slides]

Google Plus : Should You Be Interested? [Slides]

Presentation by Real Talk Design on Slide Rocket

Real Talk-Creative Communication has put up a very promising presentation regarding why we should keep our eyes on Google+ as an emerging social media (though I felt that the presentation shifts to explaining the various features of Google+ just near the end). Google has been into exploring it's place in the social media business since it's (social media's) inception. In spite of having met immense number of challenges and suffering many failures Google repels to quit. It's not the time to appreciate Google for it's bravery (we'll come to that later), rather it's time to find the answer to why isn't Google willing to quit the social media business in spite of the backlogs and suffrage.

Thank You Steve: He Who Inspired Me, To Love Design

Thank You Steve: He Who Inspired Me, To Love Design

It's a day past Apple, Inc.'s chairman and co-founder Steve Jobs's (1955-2011) death and I find myself writing this post, still dejected, feeling disowned by my own idol. A person whom I never met or knew personally, seems to have affected my life so drastically that the moment I read the news of his passing away this morning, lightning struck. Everything had come to a stand still that very moment. Like I was no more a part of this world. I realized teardrops surfacing over my eyes. I couldn't understand their significance, though. But probably that was the place that "He" had earned in my life, our lives.

Steve was a revolutionary thinker, an innovator, an icon, a visionary and a salesman-all beautifully gift-wrapper into a single package. He knew what we wanted. He knew how to get the money out of out pockets, how to get us interested in whatever he created.

NYTimes: When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.” -via kurt_loder on Twitter

He was such a genius that all I can say is Hats Off to his maker. Born to unwed graduates, adopted by parents who were not even graduates themselves (but promised to send Steve to college), dropped out of college, kicked out of his own company, disowned his own genetic daughter, suffered a unique kind of pancreatic cancer, died young; yet created the greatest of the consumer products of all times for us to cherish, to love and to connect with.

"We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will." -via ITyorkshire on Twitter

So many failures, yet so many successes that followed. How did he ever happen to achieve the feat in spite of the failures he suffered? The answer is- he loved what he did. He pursued his intuitions, and believed them, strongly enough to act upon them in real time.

"I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did." -via briandelcata on Twitter

He never feared of losing anything in life. He realized the human mortality. He knew that like every human on this planet, he would die one day, and lived his each day as if it were the last day of his life. He would wake up everyday and ask himself if he would be doing the thing he was gonna do that day if it were the last day of his life and pursued it only if the answer happened to be a "yes".

"Remembering that you are going to die is he best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose" -via symo29 on Twitter

 Such a legend, such an idol, such an inspiration, no more. Techkind seems to have it's greatest visionary. The revolutionary behind the multi-touch concepts, the iPhones, the iPods, the iPads, the iMacs and the numerous other innovations is gone. Yet, he resides in our heart and soul, in our memories, in every product he envisioned and created, in Apple, Inc. Thank you, Steve, for everything so wonderful. May your soul rest in peace.

Twitter- Faster Than Earthquakes [VIDEO]

Twitter- Faster Than Earthquakes [VIDEO]

This week as the earthquakes shook the USA from Washington D.C. to New york, it turned out a top trending tweet on twitter. As the earthquake traveled from Washington D.C. to New York City, a matter of mere 30 seconds, the twittersphere had it. So, just in order to represent it's speed, the twitter advertising team bragged about it in a video titled-"Twitter-Faster Than Earthquakes." Check it out. Cheers. :)

Twitter's Got It's Brand New Photo Uploader

Twitter's Got It's Brand New Photo Uploader

Hey hello friends. And Ah yes! Good to see you guys back after long. Have been busy with designing and blogging at another blog these days- autogranth, an autos website. Well this time I've got some news belonging to twitter.

And the news is- Twitter has finally got it's own photo uploading facility powered by photobucket. I made a brief analysis of the new facility to see how thing work in our new photo world. So here goes.

The first thing I noticed was that photos would still be posted as links just like the YouTube videos we share on Twitter, so that, when we click on the particular tweet, it gives us the preview of the specific photograph.

Though the photo uploading facility has been availed by twitter, for the time being at least it doesn't seem like it would facilitate us with creating photo albums or photo tagging facilities.

Photos are uploaded to pic.twitter.com as you can see in the snapshot to the left (By the way, that's my facebook profile photograph now. Don't spare a comment ;) ). When I tried to access pic.twitter.com directly, I was redirected to the Twitter homepage. Well this clearly shows that twitter won't at least for the time being try to create a photo farm out there.

And finally, I found the facility to be working smoothly. No glitches, no failures, and finally instantaneous upload, no delay. And a +1 to the interface. Has been designed neatly, minimal.

That was my view. What do you think? Share your views below. And don't forget to subscribe to my blog to get the latest updates directly to your mailbox or your feed reader. Cheers! :)

4 MOST WANTED WEB 2.0 ADD-ONS FOR FIREFOX

4 MOST WANTED WEB 2.0 ADD-ONS FOR FIREFOX

To make your browser and user environment more friendly, Firefox provides you with some add-ons. Below I speak about some add-ons that are considerably most wanted for the Web 2.0 people. Just check them out! :)

Stumble Upon Toolbar

Stumble Upon is one of the most wanted content sharing and social networking websites today. The Stumble Upon toolbar allows you to "stumble" random sites and make them popular if you like them just by clicking the "I like it!" button. You can stumble through videos, photos, news, friends' favorites and even websites. You can share the content or website with your friends using the "Share" button. Other than this you can make a collection of your own favorites, say Stumble Bookmarking, that can be viewed anytime on your Stumble Upon homepage.

DOWNLOAD STUMBLE UPON TOOLBAR FOR FIREFOX

MICROSOFT BING SUPPORTS TWITTER FEED BASED SEARCH RESULTS

MICROSOFT BING SUPPORTS TWITTER FEED BASED SEARCH RESULTS

Microsoft Bing- the most competent search engine by the company, which is said to be clashing against search giants, Google and Yahoo! will now have twitter feeds displayed in its searches. The best tweets for a particular keyword search will now be displayed in the Bing search results.

The update to the search engine is in order to provide better real time data feeds to the search. The search engine will also display the latest feeds on the Twitter charts. The reason why Microsoft chose twitter is evident from the fact that Twitter is the currently, most rapidly developing social networking communities on the web.

The idea seems to be innovative and is expected to improve Bing's ranking on the Search Engine charts.

Will Bing be able to jolt Google or Yahoo! by its latest update?

Post your comments to share your views. :)