Twitter have today announced the first major shake up of the sites design since it launched in 2006, but will the shake up benefit the social networking platform?

Our original thought process is no but before we start to form an opinion lets look at the changes Twitter is making.

Firstly everyones page will have a large cover photo, very similar to the ones introduced by Facebook earlier this year. These will also be visible when the page is viewed through an app. As well as that Twitter have also vamped up their iPhone, BlackBerry and Android apps making them much more advanced than ever before. The aim here is to encourage people to use the brands app rather than any of the hundreds of Twitter hosting apps available already. At the moment Twitters app is very simple however that is all about to change.

The worry here is that Twitter’s beauty has always been in its simplicity. It’s the reason people connected so well with it and the reason why it took off as a concept.

The inclusion of Facebook-esq qualities that make your page look more like a profile make us think they’re trying too hard to compete with their rival and that can only end badly. The reason we all use Twitter is because it’s so different to Facebook, if they keep adding in profile elements to the site we could find that uniqueness disappearing.

What do you think? Let us know over on the site itself.