Twitter Announces Three Significant Changes

October has been a big month for Twitter in terms of announcements, as the social networking site revealed three new happenings within the company. The announcements not only included a shakeup in the company’s leadership, but also some new features that users can expect to see in the future.

Regarding the shakeup in leadership, Twitter announced that Dick Costolo would take over as CEO of the company.  Costolo, whose role was that of COO for about a year, will take over the spot previously held by Twitter’s co-founder Evan Williams. Williams held the CEO role for two years after it was passed on to him from Jack Dorsey, the site’s creator.  Dorsey is now chairman of the board.

Williams’ move out of the CEO spot to focus on product strategy is essential at this time, since the company has been working on the development of a revamped site design appropriately referred to as “New Twitter.” New Twitter incorporates more area for extra content on the page’s right sidebar by shifting the main stream towards the left border. Costolo, who seemed optimistic about the move and the company’s future, stated that “we have awesome stuff in the pipeline, and we’re ready to accomplish more in the next two years than we’ve accomplished in the last four.”

Another important announcement this month was the launch of Twitter for Google TV. By integrating Twitter with the new Google TV, the company can fuse two forms of entertainment — the Internet and television — into one. Twitter for Google TV comes pre-installed and allows users to partake in the majority of the same features on their televisions that they have enjoyed via the Internet. 

Users can browse through Tweets, favorites, and @mentions. They can also reply to Tweets, favorite them, share them, or retweet. Users can follow others, view profiles, view photos and videos, and perform searches. They also have the options of sharing web pages, pictures, videos, and other content through the feature. 

Last, but not least, was Twitter’s announcement of its launch of Promoted Accounts. Promoted accounts is a feature that falls under Twitter’s umbrella of Promoted Products. The company had already introduced Promoted Tweets and Promoted trends in the past, and Promoted Accounts is just another way for the site to generate revenue.

Promoted Accounts is listed under the “Suggestions for you” area of the page.  While that section of the page may have suggested other people to follow, it will now also suggest accounts of companies that a user may want to follow. These new suggestions are based on each user’s public list of who they are following at the current time. 

One example of how Promoted Accounts works could be a person who follows gaming-related accounts. While they may not follow @xbox themselves, some of the people they follow might. In that case, @xbox will be listed as a suggestion for that person. Twitter plans to test the Promoted Accounts feature with only a few companies to start, and if there are no relevant suggestions for the user, no Promoted Account recommendation will appear.

For more on this topic, visit http://vator.tv/news/2010-10-05-twitter-roundup-new-ceo-promoted-accounts