Twitter has redesigned its homepage with idea of convincing newcomers that it's a good service to use. Instead of the fairly bland offering of a few static trending topics, a search bar and some log in fields, there are now dynamic lists of top tweets, the topics scroll across the page to fit more in and keep it live, and there's also a matrix of top tweeters and celebs by icon which you can roll your mouse over for more details.

"All of our recent changes embrace the notion that Twitter is not just for status updates anymore," reads the news on the Twitter blog.

"It's a network where information is exchanged and consumed at a rapid clip every second of the day. With so much being shared, we know that there's something of value for everyone. But it hasn't been easy to make that value transparent or obvious for curious folks coming to Twitter for the first time."

Naturally, the majority of regular users never really use the homepage as much as they rarely use the site itself in favour of the API, however it's an interesting move from the company in a obvious and quite fair attempt to tackle both the question "Why should I use Twitter?" and the description of it as "like the status updates on Facebook".

If the new style works, expect to see similar elements rolled out across its other pages.