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Even though 78 percent of Twitter's unique users gain access to the service through its website; the site has had some major flaws. Twitter has not been able to funnel resources into redesigning the site until now, Mr. Evan Williams, Twitter's co-founder and chief executive said, because the company has had trouble keeping up with its growth, even struggling to keep its website from crashing.

If people want to learn more about the author of a post, for instance, they must go to a new page. It has been almost impossible to follow a conversation between two Twitter users. And while a quarter of the posts contain links, if people post a link to a photo, readers have not been able to see the picture without going to a new site.

The page is now split into two panes, one for tweets and general use, the other for content and, most likely, future advertising potential.

Mr. Williams said the new site was not designed for the sake of advertisers, but the experience of viewing ads would improve. For example, when a movie studio puts out a "sponsored tweet" for a film with a link to the trailer, users will be able to see the trailer without leaving the Twitter site.

Borrowing an idea from image searching on Google and Bing, Twitter now shows a continuous stream of posts. William said they have tried to remove friction through the Twitter experience. "You can scroll endlessly down your feed, there is no more "More" button," William offers as an example.

In addition, partnerships with 16 content-centric domains - DailyBooth, deviantART, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, USTREAM, Vimeo, yfrog, and YouTube.- which allow for video and photo viewing directly on the site. This content will appear in a sidebar beside a relatively traditional newsfeed.

Only a small percentage of Twitter users are getting access to the new version right away; the company will roll it out to everybody over time. But it's being cautious about setting a timetable, saying it wants to get the launch right rather than do it quickly--which makes sense given that the Failwhale isn't exactly an endangered species. 
Twitter, which was founded in 2006, has grown so quickly in part because it opened its technology to thousands of software developers outside the company who have built Twitter tools.

Twitter currently has more than 145 million registered users and is experiencing phenomenal growth. At the beginning of the year, the company had 75 million users. That is still dwarfed by Facebook's more than 500 million users, but it is a significant user base.

Although by all accounts a banner news day for Twitter, the service did lose one of its most avid users. Pop music star John Mayer closed and deleted his Twitter account abandoning 3.7 million followers.

Mayer joins singers Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato and LeAnn Rimes as stars who have all left or taken breaks from Twitter this year.