New Twitter design is now live

Twitter has just launched its brand new interface with a new ‘discover’ option in the top menu bar. The transition from the old layout to this new one looks to be a lot smoother than the last time Twitter attempted to jazz up their style. There is far more page equity given to tweets; a welcomed move by Twitter if you ask me.

Check out a screenshot from the SEO Trench Twitter account:

The main bulk of the page is taken up by tweets from accounts you are following, so you can see more tweets than before. Profile and account details are shown in the top box on the left, whilst the popular ‘trends’ feature gets even more exposure than before.

Each individual tweet has an ‘open’ link that gives you additional options. Three words to describe my initial thoughts: 1) Slick 2) Impressed 3) Clearer.

What do you think of the change? It looks far more impressive than the previous version don’t you think?

Canonical Tag pointing to www.twitter.com?

Is this a bug? As the Twitter account of SEO Trench is so brand spanking new, there isn’t a cached version of the page. So I’ve had to use my personal Andy Francos Twitter account to highlight this change:

I’ve just checked the cache (dated November 10th 2011) from my personal account and the backend code returns the following canonical tag (what you might expect):

<link href="http://twitter.com/andyfrancos" rel="canonical" />

Here is a screenshot of the code:

If you check the backend code right now, you’ll see the canonical tag is pointing back to the homepage, rather than the individual account:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://twitter.com/" />

Here is a screenshot of the code:

So is this a bug? A temporary change? Or does Twitter want to limit the amount of accounts accessible via search engines?