I was setting up the Twitter account for a new project which I’m working on (more about that some other time) when I realised that the Twitter page looked a little different.

It seems that the real-time search capability which Twitter purchased with the aquisition of Summize is now being integrated into the main user interface. 

The new sidebar features a search input, the results of which are displayed in the main body of the page. Searches can be saved so that they become available via a single click in the sidebar.

There is also a trending topics section so that you can see the most popular topics of conversation.

The Saved Searches, Trending Topics and Following sections can all be collapsed to clean up the sidebar when they’re not required.

Speculation: It could be that Twitter are trying to win back users from third-party Twitter apps. Increasing their pageviews in preparation for paid advertising?