Twitter to revamp home page, explain what it is to your mum

By Caroline McCarthy on 24 July 2009, 5:32pm

Twitter's home page earns Zen cred by consisting of little more than a text field that asks, "What are you doing?" But that's apparently about to change -- according to Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, there will very soon be a major revamp to Twitter.com.

The reason is to give potential Twitter users -- you know, the ones who are curious about what these "tweets" Stephen Fry keeps mentioning are -- a better idea of exactly what the service is and what they can do with it.

This is slated to launch next week.

"You can try [Twitter] out without having to sign up, so you can get an idea of what Twitter is before you use it," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told AllThingsD. "We need to do a better job of explaining ourselves to people who hear about us and then have no idea what do to."

Part of this has gone live already: a section called 'Twitter 101', geared toward businesses that want to use the microblogging service for publicity, marketing or customer relations. Co-founder Biz Stone announced this in a blog post on Thursday evening.

"We coordinated with business students and writers to surface some interesting findings, best practices, steps for getting started, and case studies," Stone wrote. "The results demonstrate how customers are getting value out of Twitter and suggest techniques businesses can employ to enhance that value."

This is important because of troubling (albeit unofficial) statistics that Twitter's ubiquity may be fleeting. The majority of new users reportedly don't stick around, and third-party studies have found that a small number of active members are responsible for the vast majority of tweets.

Getting a 'real' home page could also be key for future revenue opportunities on Twitter's end. The site is so lightweight that many avid users rarely access it at all, instead using third-party clients such as Twhirl or TweetDeck. For Twitter, which still doesn't have a head of sales, getting people back to its homepage could be the first step in making a buck or two from it.