The new profiles will be mandatory as of now, there's no way around it

Dec 11, 2012 12:38 GMT  ·  By

Twitter's big news of late is the photo filters it's adding to its mobile apps. But it's not the only news, Twitter is also rolling out the new profiles for everyone. It's likely that the profile were scheduled to become available now, but Twitter pushed the date on the photo filters.

Whatever the case, the new profile pages are rolling out to everyone. They will also be the default, meaning you won't be able to keep your existing profile page any longer.

"A few months ago, we introduced new Twitter profiles so that you could make your profile beautiful and display your style on your profile page," Twitter wrote.

"By uploading a header photo on twitter.com or our mobile apps on iPhone, iPad or Android, you can make your profile more uniquely yours," Twitter explained.

The big change is the addition of a cover photo, similar to Facebook and all the other sites that adopted it.

Unlike Facebook, Google+ and everyone else, Twitter managed to ruin the idea by placing the profile photo on top of and in the middle of the cover photo which is further covered with text from your profile description.

The end result is quite frankly ugly and for no good reason. Twitter introduced the new profile pages on the web to keep up with the mobile app versions.

The profile pages look a bit better on a tablet, but they're still ugly. Wanting to stand out in the crowd is a good idea, but sometimes the crowd gets it right.

Since everyone is getting the new profile pages, if you don't upload a cover photo, you'll just get a grey slab taking up space for no good reason.

You can upload a new cover photo in the design settings page, though the feature hasn't been rolled out to all users yet, it's happening by tomorrow December 12th.