Over the last month, I have had numerous conversations with people about Twitter. Most of these are with experienced users, and the conversation tends to be around the web interface and their commercialisation model.

Over the last week or two some users (me included) are seeing a new interface, with some minor changes to the main top right nav and a couple of links around your avatar. Many of the people I have spoken to wonder why Twitter has such a ‘simple’ interface and haven’t done more to improve it.

The best place to start is with Twitters early days. Those of us that have used Twitter for a while remember the regular ‘Fail Whales’ and the constant tech problems the service had. When Twitter had an outage, it was for a lengthy period of time. From 30 minutes to many hours and was very regular. The Fail Whale’s popularity grew from their unique way of handling their problems and all manners of merchandise and discussion has come from it.

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