One of the biggest joys of creating a social media profile has always been modifying it to represent you or your business. Remember when MySpace let you have almost complete control over the look and feel of your online profile? Custom graphics, backgrounds, colors, animations, etc. Slowly all of that has died – and Twitter had remained as one of the last social media networks where you still could customize your profile with, at-least, a custom background and some custom colors. Sadly this week Twitter removed custom backgrounds from all profile pages – switching everyone to a bright white background.
In a statement Twitter said:
We’re removing background images from the home and notifications timelines on web for all users. Now, background images are only available where logged-in users will see them publicly (Tweet pages, list pages and collections pages). You can find help center content about customizing your design and where it’s visible on Twitter here.
There hasn’t been any news about WHY they decided to go this route – and honestly I can’t come up with a good enough reason myself. Maybe there was a concern that certain background images can distract from advertisements.