Twitter Adds Header Photo Option, Updates iPad App

Sept. 18, 2012 — -- You better have a nice photo in mind for your new Twitter profile.

This morning Twitter announced an update to its profile pages: Users will now be able to upload a new "header photo." The uploaded photo will appear across profiles on the mobile apps for iPad, iPhone, and Android and on twitter.com. It's similar to Facebook's Timeline photo, presenting a larger image above tweets.

"You can upload your header photo, which appears above your Tweets, to express yourself instantly, anywhere," Twitter's Sachin Agarwal wrote on Twitter's blog this morning. You can still upload a background photo for your twitter.com profile.

Twitter is also adding photo streams to its apps. With the Android, iPhone, and iPad app now you will be able to scroll through others' photos.

But of all the apps, the iPad app is getting the biggest overhaul. "We've rebuilt the app from the ground up to make it fast, beautiful and easy to use," Twitter's Sung Hu Kim wrote in a separate Twitter blog post.

The app, which was already one of the best for the iPad, expands tweets so you can see photos and web summaries of links inline. Twitter has removed the different panels, however, making the app more like its current phone app.

Twitter has become one of the main vehicles for conversation around the conventions and upcoming elections. Obama's speech at the DNC set a political record for Twitter with 52,756 tweets per minute. Four million tweets in total were sent on the last day of the DNC. In August, Twitter released its Political Index, which tracks sentiment about Romney and Obama using Tweets.

All the new Twitter features, including the header photo option and the new iPad app, will begin rolling out today.