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Meet the Kinder and Gentler Twitter Home Page

Why don’t you stay awhile? Please?
Screenshot by Nicholas Deleon

You're looking at Twitter's latest attempt to make the site more accessible to your parents.

Twitter today began broadly rolling out a redesigned home page that's only visible to logged out users. The candy coated home page is designed to make Twitter more accessible to everyday users, exactly the kind of people who are befuddled by what, exactly, Twitter is supposed to be.

"'Why Twitter' must be articulated clearly," Twitter co-founder and interim CEO Jack Dorsey told analysts during an earnings call on July 28. "What should you expect from Twitter? To be as easy as looking out your window to see what's happening. To show you what's happening in the world [first], directly from the source."

Twitter for the past several months has made several tweaks to its core product in an effort to attract new users, which would help the company generate more advertising revenue and maybe even juice its stock price (which is currently hovering near its 52-week low of $30.85). These tweaks include features like one called "while you were away," which surfaces popular tweets that you may have missed; connecting tweets that are part of the same conversation with a single blue line; and automatically displaying certain photos and videos embedded in tweets.

"This is both a product issue and a marketing issue," Twitter CFO Anthony Noto admitted to analysts on that same earnings call. It's an issue Twitter management will need to solve if it ever hopes to achieve Facebook-like mainstream acceptance.