Twitter redesign launch takes down site

Twitter's attempts to introduce a series of new features to the social networking site - designed to turn up the heat on rivals like Facebook - backfired badly when the upgrade crashed the service for many, disabled key elements and forced the company to revert to the old version of the site.
 
A message on the site on Tuesday announced: "We've temporarily disabled #NewTwitter. Our engineers are working on re-enabling it and we'll update you shortly." Even after the site was resurrected, some tools, like the 'trending topics' list, were unavailable.
 
The new look Twitter did work for some people, and included new features such as a 'follow your interests' button that recommends feeds who are interested in certain subjects to follow. The new version also integrates video and pictures.
 
The attempted relaunch comes as Twitter tries to find a commerically viable niche for itself in the social networking scene. The site was valued at a staggering $4.5bn by JP Morgan earlier this year - up from just $1bn in 2009. However, Twitter has yet to monetise itself except through promoted tweets.
 
It has been reported that Twitter is to offer businesses their own official pages on the site and to allow them to post messages of more than 140 characters - the limit for most users.
 
And by making the site more media-friendly Twitter will hope to attract more users, or at least get a higher percentage of its membership involved.
 
Yahoo Research recently concluded that although the site has 200 million registered users worldwide, more than half of content consumed on the site was generated by just 20,000 people.
 
Reliability has also been an issue. The latest outage will raise questions about the success of Twitter's efforts to combat the problem. Last month the site announced that it had moved its infrastructure to a new home at an undisclosed location and hoped to stop service outages. ·