"Friendly Twitter" Gets Even Friendlier: Interview with Eric Kim, CEO of Twylah
Ever been asked this question from your older, somewhat tech-challenged parents: "What's this 'Twitter' thing?" Eric Kim did, and after a week of explaining, his mother still didn't understand it. Understandably so, after all, Tweeting isn't for everyone. In fact, only an estimated 10-15% of the U.S. population uses Twitter. Twylah aims to change that.
Faced with his mother's question over a year ago, Eric Kim, CEO of Twylah, set out to build a new user Twitter experience. We first reported on Twylah last fall, when the product was still in its beta stage. A half a year later, and the product has gained a powerful following and some new and exciting features even more visually appealing and on-topic for readers.
Twylah Site Refreshes
The latest phase of Twylah's product development placed a focus on building an even stronger reader engagement level within its pages. Design refreshes can be seen throughout the site. The overwhelming emphasis now is about giving your audience a landing to what they are looking for, said Kim, in an exclusive interview with Technorati.
Twylah posts now include (1) a thumbnail image to the left of a tweet (when available). A familiar reading style for users, resembling Google News and Facebook, this makes for effective UI. What's more, tweets have been simplified, and clutter removed. Before, your Twylah page would show the entire tweet including the URL. The URL is now removed (2), delivering only the most critically relevant text for the reader.
Topic pages have been enhanced, too. In Twylah lexicon, "topic" is synonymous with "category." Topics are one of the defining and valuable features of the Twylah reading experience, effectively curating contextually relevant Tweets with one another to form a reading point of interest. Twylah's topic pages are more uniform than ever before. This is a monumental advancement for the presentation of Twitter content. Twylah topic pages are broken into a more familiar blog-like grid presentation, topic pages enable readers to quickly scan topical content with just enough visual and textual elements to decide whether to read, or not.
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