Twitter.com to get real-time notifications

Twitter has announced that it is adding real-time notifications to its Web-based client. The features will be rolled out to twitter.com users "in the coming weeks".

Users logged in to the website will receive notifications if someone has replied, favourited or retweeted one of their tweets. Additionally, users will also be notified immediately when they receive a direct message or when they get new followers. The icing on the cake is the fact that these notifications are fully interactive. This means users can reply, favorite, retweet, or follow back from the notification box itself, without interrupting what they are already doing.

To activate this feature, users need to head to their settings on twitter.com. In a blog post, Twitter detailed that users have the flexibility of choosing what type of notifications gets displayed on twitter.com and via email and mobile. Users can also refine the types of push notifications they receive via the Twitter app.

Twitter recently unveiled a complete revamp of the user profiles displayed on its website. Speaking to analysts, the Chief Executive of the popular micro-blogging website, Dick Costolo, stated that the company would make a number of changes to freshen up the service.

The new layout, is available to a small group of users initially, and is expected to be widely deployed to Twitter's 241 million users soon. It is interesting to note that, the redesign makes the Twitter user profiles look a lot like Facebook user pages. Users can now "pin" a tweet to stay at the top of their feed, while tweets that have received more retweets or replies will also appear slightly larger to spur more user engagement.