“We care more about new users and you finding more people to follow rather than about how everyone has been using Twitter in the past.”

Don’t read that as a bad thing. Don’t read that as a good thing. It is simply just a thing.

The fact is that the web version of Twitter doesn’t matter to me. I rarely use it and try to stay logged out of it. I don’t care about the web version.

The iPhone app though — it is the most used app on my iPhone. My iPhone is Twitter.

The design changes are just design changes and I mostly think they look nice. These changes are a nice new look at Twitter and I have no qualms with them — even though the top blue bar is a bit bright.

I really like the new ‘Connect’ tab because of the ‘Interactions’ menu that shows not just @replies, but also shows new followers, retweets, and favorites. That’s a welcomed change and I think pretty helpful for all users.

What is absolutely crazy — what drives me nuts — is the ditching of the swipe-to-act gesture. In previous versions you could swipe left or right on a tweet to slide open an action menu. From there you could quickly favorite, retweet, Instapaper, or reply to the tweet.

That was the single most fantastic thing about the app.

Now it’s gone.

I think the reason this was removed is explained by the direction Twitter is moving: gone are the days when Twitter was a tool because now Twitter is an environment.

The latest updates to Twitter seem to be saying: “stick around, don’t leave.”

I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but it’s certainly not how I am used to using Twitter.