Twitter Changes Prioritize Search, Trends And Featured Users

San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. has added a more powerful and prominent search function to its popular free micro-blogging service, along with new features for tracking the service’s most-discussed trends and users, in an expansion of a limited test begun last month. On Friday Twitter began rolling out the new features, contained in a redesigned area prominently featured at the top of the company’s Web site, to its users in an as-yet-unannounced upgrade.

Expanded Search Bar Added To Twitter Redesign

Twitter has rapidly grown to become the third-largest online social networking service, trailing only Facebook and MySpace, according to figures released by Web traffic analysis company Compete. By some measures Twitter has seen traffic increases of nearly 1000 percent over the past year, with most users first signing up to use the service in 2008 according to a recent survey from research company HubSpot.

Twitter has increasingly gained a more mainstream user base which some believe could lead Twitter to begin challenging Internet giant and search leader Google on some fronts. The Friday addition of new features including a more powerful search function only strengthen such assertions.

Users of Twitter write short 140-or-fewer-character messages that other users of the service can read if they have made a connection with one another, leaving a sizable amount of Twitter information untapped to users who have not been able to make use of the service’s previously limited and difficult to find search feature, a shortcoming the Friday changes sought to address.

Replacing the small text link that had been at the bottom of the Twitter Web site, the changes that were made public Friday placed a new search text-entry box in a position at the top right of the site, capable of searching not just for other Twitter users with names that match the search query, but for all discussion on Twitter about search terms.

Featured User List Among Twitter Overhaul Additions

Over the previous weeks Twitter had reduced the size of its logo atop the site, a move that made room for the new search box and a drop-down “Trends” feature that analyzes what Twitter users are writing about most frequently and displays a list of the ten most popular topics.

A new feature showing off certain featured Twitter users has also been added in the redesigned homepage layout, highlighting a selection of popular Twitter users who have a wide following on the service.

Details on how a Twitter user gained a listing on the new featured user list had not yet been made available, however among those listed Friday were Twitter users with 10,000 or more fellow Twitter “followers.”

Twitter users featured in the new layout appeared to have been chosen by the company, and were accompanied by short biographies.

The new Twitter search feature was derived in part from technology developed by Summarize, a start-up the microblogging service purchased last year. The new search features were available at search.twitter.com for Twitter users not yet seeing the search box at the top of the site’s homepage.

In order to make space for the new features on the top of the page Twitter repositioned links to several functions, including the profile and settings options, which have been moved to an area below where the user’s name was displayed on the Twitter site.

Changes At Twitter Come On Heels Of $35 Funding Round

While some early testers using the new search functionality have noted a marked improvement from what had been available previously, others wished that the new search feature could provide the most relevant search results, and not only the most recent ones, an area Twitter is considered likely to address as it makes searching a more prominent portion of the Twitter experience.

Many Twitter users were unlikely to notice the new changes that began rolling out Friday, as a sizable proportion of the service’s users interact with Twitter using stand-alone applications developed by various third-party companies, with names such Twhirl and TweetDeck.

After Twitter received $35 million in third round funding last month, co-founder Biz Stone said the company was well-positioned for increased growth. “We are now positioned extremely well to support the accelerating growth of our service,” Stone said, and added that Twitter was also well positioned to “begin building revenue-generating products.”

Twitter Changes Prioritize Search, Trends And Featured Users

Previously Stone has suggested that Twitter was considering a variety of methods to generate revenue. “We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them,” Stone told United Kingdom-based trade publication Marketing Magazine’s Fiona Ramsay in a February report. “We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts,” Stone added.

Some industry observers have seen paid sponsor-driven search results or featured user listings as possible methods Twitter could use as it begins to implement a revenue-generating business model.

A growing number of businesses have been using Twitter to connect to customers and to provide quick customer support, including Starbucks, Comcast and Amazon, while reputation management has increasingly been the goal of some companies with Twitter accounts, such as Web hosting firm GoDaddy and shoe-seller Zappos.

via Twitter Changes Prioritize Search, Trends And Featured Users