Will Twitter integrate Search this week?

As we’ve reported recently here at The Next Web, Twitter has been gaining traction with an increasingly mainstream adoption. However, I have always felt is interface and ‘how to get started’ mitigated against its adoption as a mainstream toll – people just did not get it.

But I started to see steps that it was improving over time (I’ve been using Twitter since March 2007), and have seen two things that suggest that it is about to evolve, in a small but very important way, to become a clearer proposition and to allow casual users to see its power and become engaged right from the moment they hit the site.

Clue One:

A few weeks ago, I noted a question tucked away in an interview with Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter, which suggested that Twitter Search would soon be integrated into the main web interface. I can’t actually locate that interview – it was buried, but I made a mental note. (I may have tweeted it – but hey, it’s Sunday, and I’m due to leave for a swim with my family. Google it, dear readers, or Yahoo it..) UPDATE: Here is that interview – on page 2 of this article. (It’s a newspaper’s site, they like pages.)

Clue Two:

I addition, last week, Twitter changed the size of its logo, which changed the layout of every Twitter user’s profile page.

So, I think we’re going to see a change soon in the web interface at Twitter which will include search. Be ready to see more people ‘getting’ twitter as the understand the power of the search facility within a few minutes of their first experience. Another big article appeared this weekend in the UK in the Telegraph Newspaper penned by Lucy Atkins.

As Robert Scoble memorably stated (I remember, he was wearing my URL in a QR-Code T-shirt) on his keynote at The Next Web 2008 in April, sites like Twitter and MySpace and Facebook really suck when you first use them, because you have no friends there. And with no friends in any environment, offline or online, the experience is “crappy”.

Why search inside Twitter is important

Integrating search into the Twitter web page puts more of what needs to be there to get the most from twitter within a click – which makes the experience less crappy. It’s like the Google search interface pulling cursor focus from the URL input line in a browser straight to the input area when you hit the page. When this first appeared, around 1998, it was a simple, but crucially important element that contributed to its success. Nobody else actually had thought of that jaw-droppingly simple, obviously useful one-line piece of javascript.

By the way, you may also want to think about updating your twitter background as this change has already taken visual effect with the logo resizing – I already have noticed many carefully designed, pixel-perfect backgrounds which fitted the old dimensions, but are out of alignment with the new twitter layout, and look pig-ugly as a result.

DISCLOSURE: I design twitter backgrounds as part of My Profile Makeover service, and until Thursday this week, I am doing these for half price free (limit of 4 per day Monday-Thursday ONLY) and donating $30 $60 from my fee to @twestival to raise funds for charity:water