Twitter revamped its website to make the microblogging service easier to use and to help companies better showcase their brands.
The new version of Twitter, which the company is gradually making available starting on Thursday, will feature a new look and feel and faster performance, the company said.
The redesigned website comes as Twitter is taking steps to introduce more advertising on the site and as Twitter faces increased competition from Web giants Facebook and Google Inc.
We have to provide the simplest and fastest way for people around the world to connect to everything they care about," Twitter Chief Executive Dick Costolo said as he introduced the new version of the site at an event at the company's future headquarters in San Francisco.
Costolo appeared alongside Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who returned to the company in March as executive chairman to oversee the company's product design and development efforts.
Twitter allows people to send 140-character messages, or "tweets," throughout the network of over 100 million users. It is one of the Web's most popular social networking services, along with Facebook and Zynga.
In October, Apple Inc integrated Twitter's service directly into the software that powers the popular iPhones. Since then, Dorsey said, the number of monthly sign-ups for Twitter have increased 25 percent.
Even as Twitter continues to grow, it faces fresh competition from Google, which introduced a social networking service with capabilities similar to Twitter earlier this year.
On Thursday, Facebook, the world's No.1 social networking service, announced a new feature that allows its users to visit a website and "subscribe" to updates from celebrities, journalists and other public figures.
The new version of Twitter seeks to simplify the service and to make it easier for new users to understand various Twitter-specific features, such as the # symbol that is used to search for topics on the service.
