Last week, Twitter started to roll out a new interface. It's trying to both make the site look simpler and show at a glance all the things you can do on it.
It's a tricky ambition which everyone from Google to Facebook and the BBC is grappling with: how to look 'uncluttered' while still revealing all the goodies on offer.
The key to Twitter's solution lies in three buttons on the left side of the top toolbar: 'Home', 'Connect' and 'Discover'. Each offers a direct link (no dropdown menus) to a different configuration of the page below. Reassuringly, wherever you are on the site, these three remain in the same spot.
Home takes you to most of what you expect from Twitter: tweets from people you follow, your profile pic and a box in which to compose you latest thoughts. (It's too small, says @suellewellyn.)
Connect offers a choice between 'Interactions' - which presents a composite list that includes the names and pictures of people who have followed you, retweets of your stuff and mentions of your Twitter name - and 'Mentions', which is, well, just the mentions. So there's some repetition: a reply to one of my tweets is the second item on my Mentions list and the third on my Interactions list, which doesn't seem very clever.
Discover is the biggest innovation. The default tab here is 'Stories', which produces a kind of Twitter news service offering such subjects as the Iowa Republican debate with a click-through to a search for #IowaDebate.
Or you can choose 'Activity', which seems to offer a random selection (sorry, a selection determined by a complicated algorithm) of what people you are following are saying or who they have started to follow. I'm not sure what this adds to what you get from the main feed on Home, although it's probably more selective and Twitter claims it will become more useful the more you use it.
The difference between the Home feed and the Activity tab in Discover looks very much like the choice between Facebook's default newsfeed, with Facebook's 'Highlighted Stories First' being the equivalent of Activity, and the other option, 'Recent Stories First', being more like Twitter's Home tab feed.
In fact, this isn't the first time the new Twitter arrangements have reminded me of Facebook. Remember how Twitter used to look (below):
Well, that has changed so that your picture now appears more prominently on the left of your Home page - just like on Facebook.
But the convergence of Twitter and Facebook is more than cosmetic: so, for instance, there's a new ability to embed tweets on any website in a way that allows people to reply without having to go to Twitter. It's a path trodden by Facebook with its Social Plugins which allow interaction between Facebook users on other websites.
And, commercially, there's convergence too: Twitter has announced business pages that will offer more branding possibilities. It starts with just 21 businesses, like McDonald's (almost 200,000 Followers - why?), but you can see where this is going. It's another idea that Facebook has pioneered - though it's actually the tweets or status updates that count rather than what the brand page looks like, since users may never go there except to sign up.
If Twitter is getting more Facebook-like, the social media giant is returning the compliment: in September it introduced a 'Subscribe' button so users can get updates from public figures that they aren't Friends with. And just last week it announced that the button will now be available on external sites too. They could have called it 'Follow'.
Overall, as Twitter grows from the self-imposed minimalism of its 140-character limit into a more colourful, media-friendly and ubiquitous service, more overlap with Facebook is probably inevitable. What next: more privacy controls? Enhanced profiles? Goodbye to 140 characters?
If the latter sounds like the end of what made Twitter Twitter, remember that Facebook took a similar leap into the unknown when it opened up registration from users on limited email networks (educational institutions, businesses etc) to the whole world. Contrary to being the end of Facebook as many inside the company feared, it led to Facebook's current 800 million user dominance of social media.
So there's nothing that can't be changed. Twitter is entering its adolescence, and there will surely be awkward moments and mis-steps. That's just part of growing up.
