Shiny new look, same old problems

A clean new redesign for Twitter is coming to soon to a phone near you. It’s pretty enough- clean and consistent with other apps we’re all using. If you’re interested in a design breakdown, Wired has a good look at the philosophy behind the redesign and Twitter’s blog has a complete list of the changes.

Users, of course, responded with great maturity, if by maturity you mean endless snark. My personal favorite was the comparison to Google Plus (remember them?) Hey, it’s the internet. Nothing escapes without snark. But users do have a point: Twitter is not the friendliest place to be these days.

Cue the second big announcement from Twitter—a new plan to fight manipulative or spammy bots. Bots in and of themselves are not bad. In fact, they can be extremely useful for customer service and public information, or just kind of fun. However, they’re also increasingly being used to astroturf users and steer news coverage.

Fingers crossed that they get this right. The spammy, botty mess does not encourage users to trust what they see on Twitter or provide a good user experience. While Twitter takes on bots at the source, here’s a great checklist to help you identify a bot in the wild.

About the author:
Tara Saylor is a communications manager by day, grad student by night and curious all the time. She is also a web nerd and recovering copywriter. Tara focuses on the channels that enable communication and using metrics to improve communication effectiveness. She tweets about communication and combines as @AnokheeTara.