Twitter Updates ⇥ blog.twitter.com

Twitter profiles gained header images today, a la Facebook, Path, and App.net. This is super exciting for people who want to spend hours dicking around with the limited customization options before giving up and installing Feather.

The official Twitter clients for both iPhone and iPad were also updated today. Both clients include the new profile pages. Interestingly, the iPhone app apparently doesn’t have fullscreen support for the iPhone 5 (via DF). Also, Taylor Carrigan notes that Twitter sucks at measuring.

Meanwhile, the new iPad app apparently sucks a giant bag of man. According to everyone I follow on Twitter, there’s no way to interact with tweet content from the main stream of posts. Even opening a link requires the user to tap on the tweet to open it, then tap the link itself. Strange, and user-unfriendly.

But this is the least of the UI sins. The entire app has been redesigned to be essentially a larger iPhone app, and it’s made Marco Arment et. al. very unhappy:

The saddest part, though, is that they had a truly iPad-native app until today, and they killed it to make room for this. [Read that sentence as if it ends in the phrase “piece of shit” – N] It’s hard not to see this as a microcosm of Twitter’s entire product direction.

Well, at least I have Tweetbot and Twitterrific. For now.