Twitter has had a rough year — and it’s only February. Following the departure of four executives, the company is looking for any good news to ride into its earnings call on February 10. To drum up enthusiasm about the service, Twitter is now extending a basic feature it rolled out early last year as part of its ongoing overhaul.
People who visit the Twitter homepage from their mobile devices will now see a generic home timeline. Before today, you could view individual tweets from a mobile web browser, but you couldn’t view news stories or trending topics without logging into your account.
Now, you can actually chase links around the network, checking out updates on your favourite athlete, then diving into US election coverage right after — all without having to create an account. The homepage now works just like it would for anyone who’s logged in.
https://twitter.com/twitter/status/694597128895614976
Twitter also announced that it’s refreshing the desktop version of the homepage. The update allows anyone, whether they’re logged in or not, to browse through many of the news topics trending on Twitter.
The two updated homepages are part of a larger effort from Twitter to gain the attention of people who aren’t regularly using the service. The company’s monthly active users — which sits at around 300 million — has been one of the metrics that sceptics have been following closely. When compared to Facebook’s 1.59 billion monthly active users, it’s clear that Twitter has room to grow.
It’s safe to say we’re sceptical. At this point, even a fully reimagined timeline or longer tweets wouldn’t be enough to save the ailing social network from our bleak expectations.