The Real Beauty Of Twitter’s New Profile Page

Twitter’s new profile page — more photos, featuring your best tweets, etc. — isn’t really about copying Facebook or making a simple service more cumbersome. Rather, it seems to be about establishing your Twitter page as your main profile page on the entire Internet. And that I’m excited about.

In my case, no address on the web offers a better picture of who I am than my Twitter stream — not my LinkedIn profile, not my Facebook profile, certainly not my two infrequently updated blogs, nor any biographical page from previous jobs. I’ve never set up an About.me page, and probably never will.

But linking someone to my current Twitter page is also a waste: Beyond the Follow button and two-sentence bio, there isn’t much utility there. My visible tweets, sorted by recency, are mostly out-of-context replies to other people. No one is going to get the right idea about me by reading those.

But it’s easy for Twitter to fix this, and it seems to be on the right page. The most obvious things to display at the top of my ideal Twitter profile are some of my best tweets, whether they’re picked by me or by Twitter’s algorithms. (If you’ve ever seen Twitter’s analytics feature, you can already filter your stream to identify “good” and “best” tweets.) Twitter could also highlight the most popular links I’ve shared, my best photos, and maybe even my most interesting followers or the people I chat with the most.

That’s a page worth sharing, and one worth referencing as my homepage/profile page across the Internet.