Twitter | Twitter Redesign Tries To Expand Reach

Twitter Inc. introduced a redesign of the microblogging service's website and mobile device applications Thursday as part of a not-so-modest goal of signing up all 7 billion people on Earth.

The new design places more emphasis on the symbols that have become synonymous with Twitter - the hashtag and the "@" sign - to make the service easier to use, said CEO Dick Costolo.

"We can, and have an obligation to, reach every person on the planet," Costolo said during a news conference inside what will be the company's new headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco.

"There are still billions of people who aren't yet on Twitter that we know we can reach and we have to reach," Costolo said. "We have to provide the simplest and fastest way for people around the world to connect to everything they care about."

Twitter, which has 100 million accounts, still has far to go before it can even have the same reach as Facebook Inc., the biggest social network, with 800 million active users worldwide.

"It's still a relatively small service," said Debra Aho Williamson, principal social media analyst for the research firm eMarketer Inc. "For the huge role Twitter played in so many worldwide events, it's still something that's not used by a huge number of people."

The redesign includes a way for users to create better brand pages, which Twitter hopes will help it compete against Facebook and Google's new social network, Google+.

"Now what you have is a choice," Williamson said. "If you're a marketer, do you invest (resources) in your Facebook page for your brand, do you invest in Google+ page for your brand, do you invest in Twitter brand pages, or do you do all three? I think it's going to be a big headache for marketers."

Twitter redesigned its Web and mobile apps to take advantage of hashtags and the "@" symbol, which Twitter users created to help navigate the service. But Executive Chairman Jack Dorsey said the company wasn't doing enough to explain what those symbols meant, especially for those new to Twitter.

The redesign creates links labeled "#Discover," which gives a list of top stories or topics based on the accounts the user follows, and "@Connect," which lists people who retweet or discuss a member's messages, which occupy a maximum of 140 characters.

The new home page uses a birdhouse insignia, a reference to Twitter's main logo. Similarly, the button to start a new tweet has a feathered quill pen.

The tweet timeline appears on the right side of the page, with top trends shifting to the left. But instead of a third "side drawer" column opening to view more from the tweet, such as a photo or video, the tweet itself expands downward.

Twitter introduced the side drawer last year, but Costolo said officials realized that it "still feels disconnected from the tweet itself. And we wanted an experience where the universe of the tweet was contained within the tweet."

The timeline is supposed to be 500 percent faster than three months ago, Costolo said.

Twitter also remodeled member profile pages to group tweets, private messages, photos, video and other details, Dorsey said.

"This is where you represent yourself on the Internet," he said. "We wanted to tell a more compelling story about you."

Facebook also began rolling out a vastly redesigned member profile page this week, also called Timeline, designed to be an online scrapbook of a person's social networking activities.

Part of Twitter's strategy is to lead users to new profile pages for companies or celebrities. Twitter has started rolling out "enhanced" profile pages to a small number of those users.

Dorsey said the increased use of hashtags and "@" symbols, such as "# Oscars " or "@Disney," replaces typing long website names.

"This is the new URL," Dorsey said.

Twitter hosted the news conference on the sixth floor of the former Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart building, which the company is remodeling.

Twitter leased the building this year after the Board of Supervisors, seeking to keep the company and its 700 workers from leaving San Francisco, approved a payroll tax break for firms that move into the Mid-Market area.

The company plans to move next summer into 220,000 square feet of space on three floors of the seven-story building, an Art Deco structure that opened in 1937. Costolo said the new space will accommodate thousands of workers, "and we're going to need all this space to scale the company to support the growth of the product we've been experiencing over the last year."

E-mail Benny Evangelista at bevangelista@sfchronicle.com .

This article appeared on page D - 1 of the SanFranciscoChronicle