Twitter just rolled out their new front page, which was known to come. I’m a bit ambivalent about it, mainly because it seems to follow all of the design trends out there at the moment.

Anyway, the new front page features search from the front as well as a selection of trending topics, which is good. The reason for this is, well, I’ll let Biz Stone tell it himself:

However, demonstrating the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now through our Search and Trends often awakens a sense of wonder which inevitably leads to a much more compelling question, “How do I get involved?”

So what’s the verdict?

I think it is a good thing that focus is on search. Both signing up and in is easily enough to access, but the killer is the popular topics section. The top one, being the clock icon, is what’s hot right now, while the calendar icon shows the day’s top tweeting, and the final one is the week’s buzz. Excellent work, my hat’s off.

It’s also worth noting that search.twitter.com still looks the same. Naturally, none of the user pages, like @blogherald or @tdhedengren, have changed, it’s just the front page.

So what do you think, a successful redesign more attuned for the mainstream audience, or a step in the wrong direction?