One of the biggest changes people aren't talking much about involves the locking down of Twitter from unregistered accounts.

You used to be able to see tweets if you didn't have a Twitter account. No more. Except in the case of embedded tweets (which is why you can still see them posted here), if you try to read twitter.com without being logged in, you won't be able to see anything.

Brutal.

Not only does this chase eyeballs off the platform, but it has a number of other immediate effects. Among other things...

1) If you share a tweet with someone via iPhone text message, it no longer shows up embedded in the text conversation. Now it has just a twitter.com link, and the recipient has to click it, AND log in. Awful.

2) You know those annoying long tweets people with blue checkmarks can write? It was bad enough having to click on them from the Twitter app and having an entire new page load in a browser to read the rest of it. Now if you're logged in via the app but not through a browser, your phone will force you to log in to read the rest of the tweet. Again, awful. In fact, the entire implementation of the long tweets has been terrible. Why not just a "see more" button which then displays the rest of it, rather than loading a brand new page?

3) This discourages sharing of Twitter links in general. One of the great things about Twitter was that you could share tweets with people who otherwise have no interest in being part of Twitter, but find certain tweets interesting. For example, I will sometimes send things to my parents from Twitter, even though they have no desire to maintain a Twitter account or make any tweets. Now I can't do that anymore.