Last week, without warning, Twitter removed the custom background images from all 300 million+ Twitter profile pages. The backgrounds on all user timelines are now blindingly white. Now there’s plenty of room for ads. Sigh.
Your custom masthead and photo or avatar remain, but the customized backgrounds that tens of thousands of people created, or paid designers to create, are history.
Drew Olanoff, writing in Techcrunch said “…the possibilities, and something I’ve heard, is that Twitter wants more control of its ad display experience. For example, if the company were to want to sell a full-homepage-takeover-background-ad that you see on a lot of sites, they couldn’t. Because of your cruddy customized one.
Now they’re toast.”
See all that white space on either side of my Tweet stream? That used to have a wonderful photo of my Labradoodle’s first day at the beach.
I took the photo and I have it on my drive, so it’s no big loss for me. But if you paid a designer a tidy sum to customize your Twitter wallpaper, you’re entitled to be more than a little miffed.
My favorite comment about the change is from DW Sin
