If you don’t “use” Twitter (and by that I mean tweet, retweet, favorite, and follow people) or had no intention of signing up, visiting Twitter.com served no purpose. Until now.
Twitter.com is now useful for people who don’t really want to jump headfirst into the whole Twitter experience. Of course, Twitter hopes that its homepage redesign will lure new users – but even if you have no desire to join Twitter, you can still check out tweets from news outlets, comedians, athletes, musicians, actors, and more directly from the homepage. What used to simply feature a signup/sign-in box now offers categories for logged-out users to browse.
“Every month, hundreds of millions of people come to Twitter to see what’s happening in the world. After all, it’s often the best place to turn to for information and commentary on live events and breaking news,” says Twitter. “People who log in get the full experience: they can browse the complete catalog of public Tweets, Tweet themselves or engage with Tweets they see. Today, we’re making a big change for the many millions of people who visit every month who don’t log in, but still want to know what’s happening.”
Twitter.com now features a bunch of categories, which when clicked open curated timelines featuring popular users in said category. For instance, clicking on the “Celebrity chefs & personalities” box opens up a stream featuring tweets from the likes of Rachel Ray, Ted Allen, Emeril Lagasse, and Guy Fieri. Clicking on the “hip hop/rap artists” tab pulls up tweets from Nicki Minaj, Pharrell, Ice Cube, Pusha T, and more.
Twitter.com currently sports 10 broad categories – news, sports, entertainment, technology, lifestyle, music, humor & novelty, arts & culture, fashion & style, and government & nonprofits. Each category has various sub-categories, for instance “celebrity news, TV shows and stars, and Video games & gamers” inside the Entertainment category.
The new Twitter.com should be live for users in the US, and Twitter says it wants to expand it internationally over time.
