Twitter Tests Major Redesign…And It Looks A Lot Like Facebook Meets Google+

Twitter has always marched to the beat of its own 140-character drummer. But, it seems like even Twitter isn’t immune to Facebook’s massive success. Twitter is testing a major profile redesign that resembles the Facebook and Google+ interfaces, as evidenced by a change in Mashable assistant feature editor, Matt Petronzio’s, Twitter profile.

The main picture and bio are scaled to the left, and much more space is given to the header photo. The home stream also looks very different from classic Twitter, with much greater focus placed on photos and content cards. And, it’s no longer a strictly vertical timeline. Content shows left to right as well as up and down.

TwitterLayout1

Twitter (as well as Facebook and other social sites) often quietly test new designs and features before the roll out the changes to a larger user base. The experimental design and funcitonality changes are usually rolled out to a small, random pool of users.

This latest design test shows the count for tweets, photos or videos (a new feature the profile calls out), who you follow, who follows you, favorites, and lists all underneath the header photo. There’s also an option to show tweets and tweets & replies for every user.

For this new design, the recommended header photo size is 1500 x 500 pixels (the current size is 1252 x 626). If the design goes mainstream, users will need to change their header photo size so that it doesn’t appear stretched or pixelated.

During the test, the user that’s part of the test (in this case, Petronzio) sees every one else’s profile as updated, too, even though they’re not part of the test.

TwitterProfile1

Twitter recently rolled out a new design to all users after behind the scenes testing just like this, but that design change was much less drastic. We’ll definitely be watching to see if this design makes it to all users sometime soon.

For their part, Twitter isn’t commenting on the design test they’re currently conducting.

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