‘Logged Out’ users — a section of people who are either not using a service at all or are simply logged out of the same. And since sign ups these days have become intelligent and keep you signed in once and for all, that ‘Logged out’ section is usually the former ones. And Twitter, with its comparatively small userbase, hasn’t really been welcome and caring of that section. Well that might change today.
Twitter has announced two fresh updates to how its homepage and the homepage timeline look to ‘Logged out’ users. While one of them is for smartphone users, the other one comes on desktop.
Announcing the release via a blog post, aptly titled “Bringing Tweets to more people around the world” (which the company actually, badly need right now), Twitter Product Manager Paul Lambert says,
We want to make great content accessible for everyone — even if you’re not signed in. Today, we’re excited to announce improvements to twitter.com that will bring those great Tweets to even more people across the globe.
First up, Twitter is rolling out its refreshed homepage across 23 countries today, a service which was available only in the US and Japan as of now. These refreshed homepage — if you are unaware — was announced by the company in April last year. The new homepage finally started showing some of the content from within the social network — a drastic improvement from that previous one, which left non-users applying every sort of common sense out there to actually decode what Twitter is all about.
With a new homepage though, things might turn out to be very different for the beleaguered social network. Starting today, when non-users go to the twitter.com homepage, they can find interesting topics to explore like Politics, Pop Artists etc. Click on the topic and you can also see a timeline of Tweets from some of the most popular accounts in that topic. It’s rich real-time content, just like the Twitter experience for users who log in.
This is much needed for Twitter — specially after the kind of time it has had with executives leaving in armies and user growth continuing to show dismal results. However, the company can take salvage from the fact that a far more number of users — 500 Million — are actually visiting the site than those who have created accounts.
The second update is a new home timeline. Starting today, Twitter is rolling out a ‘home timeline’ to people across 23 countries who visit the twitter.com homepage on their mobile devices. Before today, you could see individual tweets, making it really tough to discover stories and as to what exactly is happening inside that blue bird’s mind, without signing in.
Today we're bringing Tweets to more people around the ? on our homepage: https://t.co/VIVfJCt2PU pic.twitter.com/C0htvdamPn
— Twitter (@twitter) February 2, 2016
Now though, you can check out a news story as it unfolds, dive into the play-by-play discussions around a game, and then come back again to see that exchange between two rappers everyone’s been talking about. It’s real-time and straight from the source, thus making it exactly similar to the Twitter experience, which logged in users have — and also helping the company transform some of those logged out users into ‘logged in’ ones.
While this home timeline feature is for logged out ones, Twitter is also reportedly testing a new timeline design for logged in users as well. When (and if) this actually rolls out, time will tell.
