Twitter desktop users have been accustomed to seeing the box for typing a new tweet sitting in the left sidebar.  But Twitter has now moved the box to the middle column, appearing above the tweet stream.

They have also added a tweet prompt asking users “What’s happening” in the text box that disappears when the text box field is clicked on, which causes the text box to expand to show more lines in the text box along with add a photo option, the location and the tweet button.

The change also makes Twitter look much closer in layout to Facebook, which has their new update box above the news feed.  But it does draw user’s attention away from the trending hashtags, which appeared directly below the old left sidebar position of the new tweet box.

Twitter changed the layout in the middle of the day on Wednesday, seems to affect all Twitter accounts and they announced the change on their own Twitter account.

Here is what the new Twitter design looks like:

And here is how it looks once you click on the text box field and it expands.

And here is what it looked like earlier in the day.

Twitter’s biggest challenge is how to make their service more user friendly towards new users.  The stats for new users converting into regular Twitter users is much smaller than the company would like.

To try and combat the problem keeping new users engaged and on the site, they have added better help files and streamlined their signup process to help guide new users to show how they should be using the service.  They have also been testing new features, such as showing descriptive hashtags to help explain what specific hashtags mean and testing the term “share” instead of “retweet”.