Up Close With Twitter’s New Home Page & Topic Area

Twitter’s efforts to improve its welcome mat for people who aren’t signed into Twitter continue, but they continue to be mostly under wraps.

Twitter has been experimenting with a revamped homepage for logged out users since early February, aiming to provide a better on-ramp for the 500 million people who visit Twitter every month without signing in.

Unlike the current homepage (see screen grab above) with its single image and front-and-center sign-in prompt, the experimental homepage displays multiple categories being discussed on the network. Twitter hopes the effort will show the uninitiated what they are missing and entice more of them to join the ranks of its 288 million active users.

Twitter spokesperson confirmed that experiment is continuing and being displayed to a limited number of users. We caught a glimpse this week and it’s definitely still a work in progress. There’s no real connection between the logged out experience and the logged in. A person who hits the page can explore streams, but once he or she signs in, those streams are lost. There’s no way to find them again or follow them.

Presumably, that’s where another Twitter experiment — “Instant Timelines” — would kick in. Instant timelines are meant to give new users a engaging feed immediately after signing up without having to follow anyone.

Here’s a closer look at the homepage experiment:

The Main Logged-Out Homepage

Close Up Of Homepage Top

Tech Blogs & Reporters

If you click through to one of the topics in the left rail, you are presented with a stream of tweets from sources within that topic. This one is from tech blogs and reporters. Note that there’s no indication of what blogs or individual sources are populating the feed.

General News Sources

Here’s how the general news category looks:

Pop Artists

And for pop artists:

Search Page

The search page is very similar to what you see on the advanced search page as a logged-in user, except for the prominent “Get instant updates on” call to action in the upper left:

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck is Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, covering the latest news for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. He spent 24 years with the Los Angeles Times, serving as social media and reader engagement editor from 2010-2014. A graduate of UC Irvine and the University of Missouri journalism school, Beck started started his career at the Times as a sportswriter and copy editor. Follow Martin on Twitter (@MartinBeck), Facebook and/or Google+.

(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)