In the beginning, Twitter is “a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”. Over times, with its through-the-roof population growth rate, Twitter is becoming useful for discovering ‘what’s happening right now’ and ‘what people are saying about…’ With even larger user base of say, 1 billion users, it will becomes the ‘Pulse of the Planet.’ In short, Twitter is now a web utility to share information and also, search what people are talking about and sense what’s happening right now.

Users can search Twitter conversation streams on the Twitter homepage and this makes search.twitter.com redundant. The new interface also offers at-a-glance view the latest Trending topics, by minutes, day, week. Some Trending topics come with brief descriptions (see below).

The makeover revitalizes Twitter website. Before, its homepage is used for people to login and create accounts. With the search utility, the site now becomes functional to both Twitter members and non-members (anyone can use the search utility without registering a Twitter account). Twitter may add more features to enhance the appeal of twitter.com and possibly, turn it into a destination search platform, combining user-generated content and search utility. A precursor to contextualized ads rollout a’la Google Ads?

Twitter New Homepage Becoming A Destination Portal? originally appeared on GreyReview.com on July 29, 2009.