Twitter redesign hands-on: What to expect in mobile apps, Web

Twitter is also rolling out its first branded pages, which--not to put too fine a point on it--look like a blatant borrowing from the Facebook playbook. (See above for one major example.) Twitter, of course, isn't entirely a tool for geeks. Its role in the Arab Spring has been well documented, and it's delivering hundreds of billions of tweets every day. But it's also still searching for a meaningful business model to justify that $6 billion private market valuation. (It's raised $800 million to date). Jack Dorsey, Twitter's executive chairman, spoke at the same conference where I met up with Parker. At his panel, he said Twitter's business model was based largely on "serendipity." The new Twitter promotes "simplicity meets serendipity," which, at first glance, looks terrific from a user's perspective. The implied business message, however, is that it's dialing back on the serendipity part.