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.

Last week I received an email from Yammer letting me know about the new “Company Groups” feature they’ve rolled out, but there is actually much more than that going on in the Yammer camp these days. Here’s a rundown on the new things I’ve picked up on lately:

• Updated web interface – new graphics, drag-and-drop feed tabs, simplified right nav

  

• Groups – create a group for a department in your company and create a stream of messages specific to group members Read the full story

In a post on CNET today their tech enthusiast blogger, Harrison Hoffman (@harrisonhoffman), claims that by way of a topic on Get Satisfaction Twitter accidentally revealed their plan to integrate Twitter Search into the main Twitter interface.

This may be the first time we’ve seen a doctored up screenshot with Twitter Search in the sidebar, but Biz Stone (@biz) told us they would be integrating Twitter Search into the interface way back in July when Twitter purchased Summize.

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Though its impossible to know by browsing their website, Yammer has released a new update for their Adobe AIR desktop client. If you already use the desktop client, you should have been prompted with an update window that asked you to update the app. Being on the Adobe AIR platform, updating apps is a snap and can be done in less than 30 seconds and a few clicks.

Updates and changes to the client include:

Optional new designs (found in preferences–the wrench icon in upper right)

Though the new dark and light themes are nice to have from a user’s perspective, I still find the default theme to be the most appealing.

What I would really love to see would be user and/or admin customization of the interface colors. This would allow company admins to design interfaces that fit in with their corporate color scheme.

Made it easier to resize window (drag bottom or right edges)

Corrected tab order (all, following, received, sent) to match website

Performance and memory improvements

Ability to close application without logging in

I noticed on the original version that with the “start Yammer upon loading” option selected, it would never actually log me in. With the new update, it works flawlessly, allowing me to get started with Yammer first thing in the morning.

Added “from Desktop”, “from Blackberry”, etc. to messages display

This feature falls in line with how services like Twitter state which source the message is originating from. It’s not critical information, but it is neat to see how different employees or peers are using the service.

To determine which version you are running (current version of this writing is v100101), click on the wrench icon in the upper right and it is displayed near the bottom.

When you update the app a link is given to the release notes, something fairly common in software and application development, but you’ll need to save that link if you want to go back later and check on other updates, as the release notes are not linked to from anywhere on the Yammer website.

On October 6th the team at Tumblr released an interface update to the Customization page. The page itself is beautiful and very clean, though several have pointed out on the Tumblr blog that it is inconsistent with the rest of the dashboard which also recently went through an interface update.

In the blog post the Tumblr team makes note that this update will allow for some big features they are about ready to launch. Only time will tell what these features are and why this interface update makes sense.

If you’ve not yet logged into Twitter this morning you’re in for a surprise. Last night the Twitter team rolled out a new interface design for its platform that appears to have taken a turn for the better. In the new interface the menus have been streamlined, logos have been tweaked (and decreased in size) and the profile design customizer has been improved.

The big things users will probably notice are the moving of the tabs and the use of AJAX in the menus:

We did this [moved tabs] for a couple reasons. For one thing, it makes them larger targets and easier to access. But more importantly, it was an investment in the future. We plan to have more tabs, and we’d run out of room putting them along the top.

When you click on the Home or @Replies tab when you’re already on that page, the updates are now refreshed via AJAX, instead of loading the whole page, which should be faster.

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