It’s only visible to users who aren’t logged in, but it’s certainly an improvement on what we had before.

With the new design, we’re intentionally featuring more dynamic content on the front page, revealing a sample of who’s here, what folks are tweeting about, and the big topics that they’re discussing. The homepage now features a set of algorithmically-selected top tweets that automatically appear every few seconds. It also highlights a random sampling of suggested sources; hover over any of them to see a profile summary and their latest tweet. Trending topics now scroll across the page, allowing us to present a large set of trends using little page real estate. Hovering over some of these trends will show a description explaining why the keyword is (or has recently been) popular.

All of our recent changes embrace the notion that Twitter is not just for status updates anymore. It’s a network where information is exchanged and consumed at a rapid clip every second of the day. With so much being shared, we know that there’s something of value for everyone. People who internalize the value of Twitter understand the power of this simple medium. But it hasn’t been easy to make that value transparent or obvious for curious folks coming to Twitter for the first time.

As they say, the homepage is very much a work in progress, and needs to be an ongoing project to reflect changes in the way the platform is seen and used.

Read more at the official blog.

This works best if you’re fairly well-established.

1. Go to Twitter search.
2. Enter your company name, followed by the word ‘sucks’

(If you don’t get any results, use different words and phrases. Or maybe your business needs to be trying harder?)

Here, for example, is Comcast.

This also works with individuals. Obviously, the more unique your name is, the more genuine the results are likely to be.

You can, of course, put a positive spin on this – maybe Comcast rules – or search for any keyword, opinion or emotion you like. It just takes a little creativity. But the value is absolutely tremendous.

Maybe you could permanently run a search for your brand and a given keyword (sucks, hate, rubbish, complaint, or even an emoticon) and directly address any issues your customers are having? Twitter excels at brand and consumer management, and the first-line, first-response support possibilities are enormous.

(Tip: if your brand has more than one word, contain it within “quotation marks” and use Boolean operators to get a purer search. For example, here’s Best Buy. You can do even more with Twitter’s advanced search options, which likely will make a better starting point for novices.)

Some interesting stats over at Pingdom.com, which tracks Twitter.com uptime since March 2009, as well as downtime and average response.

Twitter has seen just 55 minutes of downtime thus far in March, a massive improvement on some of the frightening numbers we saw last year (although most of these can be traced back to one or two very bad days).

The uptime number is pretty impressive, but it’s interesting that the average response has been steadily getting slower since last November’s benchmark. Certainly not enough to notice, but that’s a trend that Biz Stone et al will want to see (at least) flattened. A significant reversal might be an unreasonable expectation given the growth we’ve seen in monthly tweet numbers.

Still, it does give confidence in the system, and makes you realise that Twitter isn’t as down anywhere near as much as it used to be. Although you might think otherwise judging by the number of tweets about it, even if asking ‘Is Twitter down?’ on Twitter is about as surreal as you can get.

I’m interested in all the ways that you interact with Twitter, including Twitter.com and everything else.

There’s not a lot of really good data on Twitter client usage and it would be nice if we could get a lot of votes here – my goal is to see at least a 1000 responses on this page.

Please share this poll with your friends and colleagues – click here to retweet this post and help me out. Thanks!

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If you can’t see the poll, please go here to vote.

(If you selected ‘other’, please expand on this in the comments. Thank you.)

An impressive-looking chart from Twitter which, if it is to be believed, warrants a deserved round of applause. In just six months, spam on the network has been slashed from around 11 per cent of all tweets, to just one.

(Read more at the Twitter blog.)

Are you seeing less spam? I’m not so sure it’s as dramatic as the graph would imply, but I’ve certainly noticed a difference in trending topics of late, which used to be almost entirely overwhelmed by spammy tweets looking to take advantage of the sudden popularity of a subject.

That said, reply spam is still an issue. And I’m pretty confident that direct message spam is not included here, as I’ve seen almost no improvement in this at all in my test accounts.

Of course, if you rarely venture into trending topics and maintain an optimised network, spam has likely never been much of an issue for you. But it should give us all confidence that Twitter has made this effort and seen these kinds of results.