14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter is a great service and its creators want to keep it that way. Not the 'great' part, presumably they want this as well, but the 'service' part. It always catered to third-party developers and avoided adding too much features to the basic product. This has changed slightly recently, but Twitter hasn't lost its aim. Still, it needs to offer a decent product by itself too and, while the site has been getting some much needed attention in the past few months, the mobile version has been mostly neglected. Not any more though, Twitter is testing a brand new mobile site which offers a hugely improved experience compared to the previous iteration.
“It’s probably no secret that Twitter has an active developer community, using our APIs to create fantastically innovative apps. Nor is it a secret that Twitter and mobile phones go together like birds and flight. What may be a less known fact is: Lots of people access Twitter on their phones via our good ol’ mobile website, and trusty ‘m’ has been delivering tweets faithfully,” Leland Rechis, head of Twitter's User Experience team on the mobile front, wrote.
“So, the mobile team here built a brand new mobile web client from scratch, using only Twitter APIs, and we'd like to share the results with you. Our new mobile web site is previewing today, just point your phone’s browser to http://mobile.twitter.com,” he added.
As a service which relies a great deal on outside developers, its APIs should be top notch. So, in order to prove this, Twitter 'ate its own dogfood' and built the new mobile site using solely the public APIs. The results are actually pretty impressive and a huge leap over the previous version, which is still the default mobile page for now.
The design of the page has been updated to bring it in line with the regular site which got revamped a few months ago. But it's more than just a new coat of paint, the new site also has some much needed features. Users have the possibility to check out their @replies, direct messages and favorite tweets. It also shows the users' avatars next to the tweets though this can be disabled for slow connections.
However, it doesn't have support for one of Twitter's latest features, Lists, though this is likely in the works and a couple of other things are missing as well. Finally, there is no geolocation integration, though this is true for the main site as well. For the time being, it's not going to replace the dedicated apps available for most smartphone platforms, but as many mobile users still went through the site it is a welcome update.
Twitter says the site is optimized for Webkit-powered browsers so it should work great on the iPhone, Android, Nokia S60 and Palm OS devices. Other browsers work as well, but there may still be bugs for the time being. It's still a trial run for the time being, but it should replace the current mobile site soon enough.
