As announced earlier, Twitter has made some significant change to its web interface UI. Today, it has added two new features : @mention stream and activities stream. Classic @mention and retweets tabs are no more !!

What ??!!

Given the simplicity (which I think is the beauty) of twitter, How major a UI transition can you imagine? Well this one is pretty serious. The classic @mention and retweet tabs are replaced. Now we have:

• @mention stream, showing usual @mentions, new follower notification, and notifications when your tweet is retweeted or favourited. But there is an option to have only @mentions viewed. But currently there is no such facility to just view retweets.

The new @mention stream

• Activity stream, showing any kind of activity from people you follow like follows, retweets and favourites. More like a Facebook ticker for Twitter.

Did I *want* it?

Quite honestly, no. The earlier UI was fairly simple and straightforward to use. Say when I need to know which of my tweets were retweeted, I just had to switch to “Your tweets retweeted” tab. But in the new UI, it is merged up somewhere in the @mention stream. Bringing back the Retweets tab or having an option to filter out just retweets from @mention stream would be nice. Maybe its just me hating a change.

At the same time I have to admit that the activity stream appears to be quite handy.

Eitherways vast majority of “hardcore” twitter users access it via some app rather than the web interface. Still a change is a change !!