New Twitter

I’ve been using social media for ten years. Sorry, should I have introduced myself before saying that? For some reason, this feels like one of those meetings where you sit in a circle, admit your faults, and try not to get too many cookie crumbs on yourself.

I’m not going to do that, it’s too cliche. I’ll accept cookies, though.

Whenever a social media platform changes their layout, you can always rely on people to complain about it. It’s inevitable. People like negativity. It’s ironic, if you think about it.

Twitter has come a long way from the days of manual retweets. Remember that? You had to copy someone’s tweet, add their @, and then put an “RT” in front of it, all while staying under 140 characters. Such a process.

Might as well have just pulled out the papyrus and quill pen, and sent the message out via passenger pigeon.

And then they took away the Favourite button which was a star and turned it into a Like button with a heart icon, making it Valentine’s Day, every day. What a nightmare.

People complained…about the button changing, not the Valentine’s Day every day thing.

And then they made the square profile picture a circle! Who are we, Humpty Dumpty?

That made people mad because photos should be a square and not cut off at the corners. How dare they force us into a circle? No one puts us in a corner circle!

So, after circle got the square (told you it was Valentine’s Day every day), they started putting our timeline out of order.

*Insert long tangent here about how tweets appearing out of order makes me miss some tweets, or see others more times than I want to*

Then there was the whole thing about how tweets would now be 280 characters, which most people dreaded, but it hasn’t turned out that bad.

Note: These changes may not have happened in this order, but I’m not going to waste my time looking it up. 

I’m getting off topic.

New Twitter came out a few days ago and I was expecting to hate it. I had taken a look at it over the last few weeks, as a preview, and determined it was ridiculous.

Well, hello my name is Paul, and I am the ridiculous one.

*Eats cookies*

I like New Twitter. There, I said it. I like New Twitter.

The main headings being on the left side, rather at the top, is surprisingly refreshing. If I was nitpicking, the Profile button should be at the top of the list, but whatever.

I like how Messages open in a side window, so you can still see other messages coming in while you’re talking to someone.

I like how if you click on a tweet, it takes you to a new page and you can scroll smoothly through the replies.

If this were the first version of Twitter and we didn’t have anything else as reference, I think people would really enjoy it. That’s how I try to view things.

One thing I don’t like is that they took my red colour scheme from me. With Old Twitter, you could pick any colour you wanted for the buttons and hashtags. Now, you have a choice of six.

Blue, Yellow (or is it Gold?), Pink, Purple, Orange, and Green.

The whole reason I had red with Old Twitter, was because I thought the blue was boring and generic.

So, without red to choose from, I needed a new colour. I’ve chosen a colour and will now explain how I selected it.

Let’s start with Green. I tried it out for a few hours and it wasn’t bad, but it’s green. Do I like green? Am I green person? I don’t know. It doesn’t jive with me, though it was a nice change and easy to see.

Orange just reminds me of Halloween and I don’t really care much for Halloween.

Blue was too generic. I can’t do it.

Is the Pink supposed to be half red? Is it a tweener? Am I colour-blind? It’s just a strange colour and I can’t be staring at it all the time thinking about how weird it is.

It just hit me – it’s the colour of Barney.

Yellow (or is it Gold?) is nice, but it’s hard for me to read. It’s one of those bright colours that hits you like a line drive, rather than a lazy fly ball. If you don’t know baseball, that last sentence went right through your glove.

So, all that is just leading me to say that the colour I’ve chosen is Purple. I know, I’m shocked too.

I like purple. Guys can like purple. Fight me. In university, my residence floor colour was purple. We had purple sweaters and bandanas, so that’s left some purple residue in me.

I also had a nice purple/white dress shirt at one point, too.

On Twitter, the colour is just easy on the eyes. I can read it. It’s a warm colour. It says, “Hey, take a nap or have a snack.” I like that. The other colours don’t talk to me like that.

Blue: “Hey, I’m unoriginal.”

Yellow (or is it Gold?): “You like me but I’m hard to read.”

Pink: “You think I’m red, but I’m not red, I’m Barney.”

Orange: “PUMPKIN.”

Green: “I look like your front lawn.”

See, terrible pick-up lines.

If they still offered red, I’d have chosen the red, but they didn’t. They had limited options and I talked myself out of 83.3% of them.

So, purple it is. It’s different. It’s a nice change. I like it. You can judge me, but you’d be wasting your time.

Most people don’t like New Twitter, but they’ll still use it. Two months from now, they won’t even think about the old one. It’s just “in-the-moment” outrage because that’s what everyone does.

Not to end this abruptly, but I’m going to end it abruptly because I’ve run out of words.

Thanks for reading!

Do you like New Twitter? What colour theme did you choose? Are we supposed to tweet forever?