Twitter site redesigned

Twitter has announced big changes to its website that could make the site more attractive to advertisers.

The social networking site said on its blog Tuesday that the upgrades will include the ability to view:

• Content related to a tweet, such as replies, other tweets by the user, and a map of the location the tweet was sent from.
• Bios and recent tweets of any given user by clicking on their username.
• Embedded photos and videos, including marketing trailers, directly on the site, via partnerships with other sites such as TwitPic, TwitVid, Flickr and YouTube.

The site also promises a new design with a "cleaner" timeline and "infinite" scroll, so users no longer have to click on "more" to view older tweets.

Analysts across the web have been speculating that the changes are intended to boost advertising.

"The aim of the new Twitter is engagement — keeping users within the Twitter fold and stopping them from wandering all over their web to get their Twitter fix," wrote Silicon Valley-based BBC blogger Maggie Shiels. "All good in the chase for those advertising dollars."

Her opinion was echoed by marketing blogs such as ClickZ and Utalkmarketing.

The site had 145 million users at the beginning of September, Twitter CEO Evan Williams reported in a blog post at the time.

However, many people access the service through third-party applications that provide features unavailable on the website itself.