Top 5 headlines, for your 5 minute coffee break...

In at 1
Twitter redesigns home page to attract new users

Twitter has redesigned its home page to focus on search, to show new users how the site can be useful.

The site originally centred around the concept of status updates, asking people one simple question: ‘What are you doing?’ It will now focus on more useful features to attract new users.

The new home page centres around a search box that asks visitors to enter topics to see what people are tweeting about. It also displays trending topics more prominently.

Twitter founder Biz Stone said on the company blog, “Helping people access Twitter in more relevant and useful ways upon first introduction lowers the barrier to accessing the value Twitter has to offer and presents the service more consistently with how it has evolved.”

In at 2
Yahoo! Deals site up and running

Yahoo! has launched a new website that aims to help consumers find the best shopping offers.

Dubbed Yahoo! Deals, the portal was set up partly in response to a large online audience that is looking for money-off vouchers and other coupons.

The site effectively acts as an aggregator for a variety of shopping deals and provides other features such as money-saving advice via video content which aim to help customers during the recession.

Greg Hintz, head of Yahoo! Shopping, said: "Frugality is the new 'cool'.

"We now know that couponing and bargain hunting are losing their stigma and are now a regular habit for many people."

He added that Yahoo! wants to be at the "centre of people's online lives" and is making the Yahoo! Deals service an easy place to find coupons and special offers.

Mr Hintz's comments come after a recent survey by the search engine found that 43 per cent of respondents are using coupons more than they were last year.

One of the findings from the internet research was that easier access to coupons would motivate people to use them on a more regular basis.

Yahoo! Deals is not the first time the company has responded quickly to consumer demand. In June last year, the firm added new domain name ymail.com to its Yahoo! Mail service after customer requests.

In at 3
Twitter used by 44.5 million worldwide

Micro-blogging site Twitter gained around seven million new visitors in June this year, attracting 44.5 million unique visitors globally during the course of the month, according to market research firm comScore.

ComScore's figures represent a 19 per cent increase on May 2009 and a 1,460 per cent inflation year-on-year and means that Twitter is the 52nd largest site in the world - just behind the BBC.

The research also revealed that the audience for Twitter is now 55 per cent international, with 20 million of its visitors coming from the US.

Last month, comScore revealed that of the 36.9 million people in the UK aged 15-plus who used the internet at home or at work in May, 29.4 million visited at least one social networking site.

While Twitter has been growing in popularity, Facebook ranked as the most popular social networking site with 23.9 million visitors and Bebo was second with 8.5 million guests.

In at 4
Yahoo! sees rise in Q2 profits

Yahoo! has announced higher net profits for the second quarter while also unveiling a new homepage design.

The internet services company said that it saw profits of £86.3 million for the three months to June, up eight per cent compared with last year.

However, revenues fell by 13 per cent to £962 million during the same period.

Yahoo! also announced the beta release of its new homepage, which incorporates customisable content from third party websites and services and has been designed to offer a uniform experience across the mobile and desktop platforms.

More than 60 Yahoo! branded and third party apps are currently available for users to integrate into their homepages, with Yahoo! also offering tools to aid the development of new apps.

"Our new homepage is a perfect example of our efforts to create innovative products aimed at increasing user engagement while offering the most compelling advertising proposition in the industry," Carol Bartz, chief executive of Yahoo!, says.

Yahoo! says that the new design is the biggest overhaul of its homepage since the company was first established. And finally at 5
Content-driven websites gain more traffic than etailers

Websites which focus on free content receive 73% more visitors than transactional sites, according to figures from Hitwise UK.

The measurement firm found that in the past three years, free sites in categories such as entertainment, social networks and news and media had, on average, increased their share, while share of visits had declined for sites such as shopping and classifieds, business and finance, and travel.

In July 2006, Hitwise found the transactional categories had 5% more traffic than free content.

Robin Goad, Hitwise UK research director, said the decline had been accelerated because of the decrease in consumer spending over the past 12-18 months.

“Although people are using the internet more than ever, the way they use it and the sites they visit are constantly changing,” he said. “In particular, the charts show that just because people are using the web more, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re spending more money online.”

Source: IAB, Marketing Week, NMA, BBC