Twitter has rolled out a new profile design with heavy emphasis on photos. It is being rolled out over the next few weeks, my account doesn't have it yet.
Follow me on Twitter: curiouscat_com.
The new large banner image is good and the positioning of the Twitter user's avatar in that is good. The old design had the Twitter user's avatar in the middle of the larger photo which wasn't a great design.
The changes are not that large it doesn't seem to me, just some layout tweaking for more image space and a tiny bit of change (the list of followers is not "card" like instead of old tweet stream like) but still minor.
I would provide more space for the user to explain themselves and link to their other web sites, interests etc. I would have a new profile page (in addition to the current tweet stream page) that let the user write few paragraphs about themselves. I would let them add several web links (maybe force it into specific patterns but probably not). If it was forced into a specific pattern you could say let them add, for example):
I would provide interesting view of data that can be gleaned from the Twitter universe on the profile page. I would have a "tag" cloud based on their use of # in their tweet stream (I would also put this tag cloud on their tweet stream page). How about a tag cloud based on those they follow? A tag cloud based on their favorited tweets.
Provide a link to their top 20 retweeted tweets (and such like things top 20 favorites). Provide another view with a decaying over time variable (so new stuff would rise and older stuff drop - like Reddit but much more slowly).
I would let them select tags they are interested in (and based on tags selected suggest other tags and users to follow). I would show links to popular users on specific tags. I would likely and some Klout like ratings (including doing so based on topics).
I would provide interesting data mining information based on users. For example, take the list of people following me, show a list of the top 20 people followed by everyone following me. Show a list like that but tweaked to compensate for overall popularity (so lets say Bill Murray is followed by millions of people and Justin Hunter isn't 5 of my followers following Justin would put Justin ahead of the 15 following Bill). I think there are probably all sorts of cool ways to show interesting stuff based on the data Twitter has.
I would also turn off nofollow on some links (I am not that tied to how this was done, personally I would do it for all links, in tweets, profile etc.) based on algorithms determining the user was popular and should be "trusted" as not spammy. It might make sense to have a couple levels based on how good the algorithm detrained the user to be.
Twitter is stuck in this outdated model based on
fear of Google penalizing sites that annoy Google and so
Twitter marks all non-Twitter links as "untrusted" (nofollow).
Maybe Twitter is also using nofollow because based on the poor way Google is using nofollow Twitter's pages itself are pushed high by telling Google not to trust any links on Twitter. Google+ started off not telling its Google search people all their links were untrusted. I am not sure, but when I look now it seems like Google+ has started untrusting all links that don't directly aid Google (so internal links to a Google page - like the users Google+ profile are trusted and all other links are said to be untrustworthy). We really need the other search engines to step of their game as Google gets worse and worse about finding good content and instead is focused on finding content that don't run afoul of any Google dictate.
It is this fear of Google that results in sites marking all links not to their sites (or sites with which they have corporate allegiance - so large companies benefit greatly from the aim to provide very few links that are not marked untrusted, as they have large set of corporate sites and large corporate alliances).
There is so much more Twitter could do with profiles and customization they really should be doing much more by now.
Related:
Google Falls Victim to Google’s Confusing Dictates, Punishment to Google and Google Users Likely -
How Google Could Improve Results (2005, most are still needed) -
posts on usability (management blog)
I would also let you delete direct messages. I have idiotic spam DMs and I can't see anyway to delete them.
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