This week has been busy for the Twitter GUI. Here’s the rundown on what may look different.

Replies are Now Mentions

On Monday Twitter announced that the Replies tab will instead be referred to as Mentions. Twitter updated the feature earlier this week to include all mentions of a person’s username, rather than limit it only to messages beginning with the username.

The Twitter team determined that as the service has grown, people have changed the way they are using it (and the way Twitter had intended it to be used). As a result, more people are using @reply usernames when referring to other people or accounts on Twitter. With more businesses and brands setting up shop on Twitter everyday, this practice will only increase. It’s essentially good karma to include the username of a brand you are talking about if they are on Twitter.

“Sitting down to talk through @microblink ideas and happenings with @miketempleton and @chewbocka; focusing on @wthashtag work” -@jensenrf

“Getting ready to present with @hillabean to a room of Iowa CCIM Chapter folks. Say hello to the room!” -@nathantwright

Other popular desktop tools have already incorporated this feature, including Twhirl and Tweetdeck. In fact, that feature alone used to be enough of a reason to use them in the first place.

In addition, the Replies tab is no longer visually represented as “Replies”. Instead you’ll see your username in it’s place, like “@miketempleton”.

Twitter Hires Creative Director

As Twitter faces the challenge of keeping its interface both simple and relevant, they’ve acknowledged that it requires the right person with the right vision and sense of leadership. Twitter found that in Doug Bowman, former Visual Design Lead at Google, and hired him on as Creative Director.

The Creative Director role previously fell under Biz Stone’s responsibilities, but he mentions that “as the company’s team continued to grow…it made sense for me to align more with Evan…on the company-building aspects of Twitter.”

Twitter Sidebar Gets Restructured

It’s been just three weeks since Twitter began integrating the Twitter Search bar into the upper right-hand corner of the web interface (Mark still hadn’t seen his interface updated as of this week). Overall the improvements were a big step forward, but some were still slightly unhappy with how things were shuffled around.

Today, on April Fool’s Day, Twitter unveiled even more adjustments to the sidebar. After logging in this morning I noticed several changes:

The upper right-hand set of links has been reverted to default (moving Profile and Settings links back to the top from the previous configuration).

The outlined “tabs” are no longer present in the sidebar.

Twitter Search bar has been moved into the sidebar.

Twitter Search trending topics are now listed in full below the search bar.

Overall the changes are fairly simple adjustments, but it falls right in line with what Twitter described when hiring Doug Bowma: “the challenge of staying simple and relevant”.

I like the new changes because it gives me a link to my Settings from any Twitter page I access (previously you couldn’t access this via link if you were on someone else’s profile page) and because the trending topics are now displayed at all times. This keeps them in front of me throughout the day and encourages me to interact with them. Before the trending topics were only available if you selected the dropdown display.

Could this be the work of Doug Bowman being realized, just two days after being hired? It’s hard to say, but I’m guessing they’ve had these adjustments in mind for some time.

Now let’s just hope this new, improved user interface isn’t a cruel April Fool’s joke that will be whisked away tomorrow and stashed being a premium Twitter account.