The first change that irks me is the new Connect screen, which replaces the Mentions tab. Instead of getting a listing of replies or tweets mentioning your username, you get something closer to a Facebook feed. The stream is cluttered with messages along the lines of “Mr. Follower and 6 others are now following you. Isn’t that great?” Oh, and anytime someone retweets one of your updates, it goes in there too. You can still get to the Mentions timeline, but it requires a second click. I imagine it’s even more “useful” if you have a half million followers.

I’m still not sure where they buried the Direct Messages page. I know it must be around here somewhere…

Next on the list is “Brand Pages.” Now the Twitter profiles for large brands get a few extra features that, while I’m sure they find useful, kind of detract from the Twitter experience and remind me of Myspace. (Remember them?)

Brand pages get to have a graphical banner on their profile, right above the timeline. They also get to make a featured tweet “sticky” and pin it to the top of their timeline. Oh, and did I mention any linked photos or videos in those sticky tweets get auto-expanded?

Now for the icing on the cake. Remember Loren Brichter’s excellent iOS app? Formerly known as Tweetie, it won an Apple design award before Twitter bought it and made it the official app. Well, Twitter has completely scrapped that codebase and replaced it with something that reminds me of Facebook’s kludgy app. It’s missing many of the great features of the old app, and feels very watered down in comparison. But it looks and acts more or less the same on Android, which is…good for Android users, I guess.

Gruber nailed it in his review.

…today’s new Twitter, is something else. It’s an attempt at a best way to do Twitter that is as consistent as possible across multiple platforms, ranging from the iPhone to Android to the mobile and desktop web. I don’t want an iPhone app that’s constrained by the restrictions of a mobile web app. The whole reason I prefer native apps is that I like experiences that far exceed what can be done in a web app. This is a native app that looks and feels like it was designed and polished according to the norms of web apps, not other native iPhone apps.

It looks to me like #NewNewTwitter is the new #Dickbar. Fortunately, there are still plenty of third-party apps, which have had an increase in sales since the update. (Tweetbot and Twittelator Neue are a couple of good ones.)

Starting in October, the +1 button will begin to appear on display ads on your site. With a single click, people will now be able to endorse specific ads and make them more likely to appear to their social connections.  We believe that these recommendations could lead your readers to notice ads on your site more, leading to more clicks and higher returns for you over time.

Clicks on the +1 button will not count as ad clicks, and publishers will not receive revenue for them, but should help increase CTR. (People are more inclined to click ads that are recommended by people they know.)

+1: Now making Display ads more relevant [Inside Adsense Blog]

So if you’re like me, and have a personal URL shortener that generated smaller links than t.co, you probably think this move is a little silly.

On the plus side, Twitter.com and the official Twitter clients (as well as any that use the right API methods) automatically expand all t.co links and display the URL they point to. So users should optimally never see the t.co URLs at all. If you continue to use your own shortener, it’s URLs will be re-wrapped, but users will still see your link.

Developers should check out the t.co URL Wrapper documentation page, as well as the wrap_links parameter in the statuses/update API method.

When reddit was acquired in October 2006 by Condé Nast, it was receiving about 700k page views per day. Now, reddit routinely gets that much traffic in 15 minutes. This explosion in traffic created technical, cultural, and organizational growing pains.

Oh, and kn0thing (a co-founder of the site) is coming back as a board member.

Independence [blog.reddit]

Joost de Valk has put together a good tutorial on how to fix that issue. It features code snippets that will load the widget JavaScript asynchronously, keeping the buttons from holding up the page loading. Also, it even adds Google Analytics and Clicky tracking so you can tell if people are actually using your buttons.

When Google released +1, I quickly identified how to track interaction with that button. The obvious “follow up” was questions from people on how to track interaction with other buttons. Not for each of these social buttons tracking of interaction is actually possible. It depends on how the button was designed whether this will work or not. I got it working for Twitter and Facebook, so I’ll share the code for tracking interaction with their respective social buttons below.

Social Buttons: Adding them to your site & Tracking them [Yoast]

It’s neat, particularly if you’re a blogger. You can sort of tell the ratio of “real” followers versus spammers and people who are pretty much ignoring your tweets, based on the “true reach” score. And I find it interesting to see how it maps interactions and figures out who you influence, and who influences you.

You can create links to retweet, reply to or favorite messages, as well as to follow or display a user.

As an example:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<a href="http://twitter.com/intent/retweet?tweet_id=53796378291355649">Retweet</a>

More fun things for developers and web designers to play with. And you can now get official logos and UI sprites as well.

Twitter Web Intents [Twitter Developers]

Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?

- No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.

Obviously this is good news. Perhaps we will see something along the lines of Skype’s buyback happen, where the service’s original founders bought the company back from eBay for less than they sold it for. So long as Kevin Rose doesn’t buy it, Delicious should probably be all right. (But I would still recommend backing up your bookmarks, just to be safe.)

Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us back in 2005, and has done little with it. They haven’t run ads on the site or really made any apparent effort to monetize the service. And instead of, I don’t know, selling the service to someone who could make it profitable, they decide to just shut it all down. (Let’s not forget that a meticulously-tagged index of links and their popularity is a wonderful mine of data that advertisers and publishers would love to be able to get metrics from.)

Suffice to say, I am majorly unhappy about this. I have been a Del.icio.us user for years, and have over 2,500 tagged bookmarks stored in the service. Yahoo is suddenly yanking the rug out from under users who have been depending on the service for years. We would gladly put up with ads, or maybe even premium plans. But no, Yahoo is just saying “screw you” to everyone.

Yahoo is dead to me. One by one they are closing the few services that are worth anything. (I assume Flickr and the wonderful BOSS Search API can’t be too far behind?) The services that they are keeping around are things like their vapid content offerings and underwhelming webmail application. They are still stuck in the ’90s, and they are blatantly disregarding the assets that are their most valuable.

Anyway, be sure to export your Delicious bookmarks as soon as possible so you don’t lose them when the site closes. Find an alternative service or simply import them into your web browser’s bookmarking tool.

Update: Yahoo has announced that they will not be shutting Delicious down after all.

TechCrunch has a short but informative post on the matter.

Twitter says that these tweets will still be based on targeting. What they mean is that you should only see them if you follow people or products on Twitter that are related to the Tweet ad they have to show you.

Again, for now, these Tweet ads will only appear to users who are using HootSuite, a client which about a million of Twitter’s 175 million users use. But if this is a success, you can expect this to roll out to other clients shortly. And yes, these ads could appear on Twitter.com one day as well.

It’s interesting that they will be limiting their rollout to HootSuite users for the time being, but I suppose they want to gauge users’ reactions before rolling it out to everyone.