Your new Twitter wallpaper is the color #F5F8FA. It looks like this:
It's a totally sterile shade of blue-gray. It's a great color for hospital walls or throw pillows, but not at all what you chose as the background image of your Twitter experience. This week, Twitter pulled the option of customizing background images on its website. It also replaced user's chosen images with a single color, putting that same blue-gray on everyone's page. It's utterly plain and totally inoffensive, completely devoid of customization. Twitter users hate it.
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Our wallpapers were, like most things filling our social media profiles, a tiny piece of ourselves. Look, I like this thing, or Hey, check out how clever this image infers I am. Our investment in them is probably an indication of Internet thirst more than anything else—a mildly desperate way to show off a little. Despite this not-so-valid reason for our attachment, your wallpaper was a backdrop for your time in Twitter, an image that conveyed, "This is my Twitter!" It sat behind all the tweets coming as a sort of home for them. Seeing it unceremoniously and unilaterally dumped in favor of something so bland is a little unsettling.
And you can expect to see more of this. Twitter long has been going the way of Facebook, dropping user customization in favor of platform uniformity. Twitter would rather you focus on all the interesting things happening on the network, not on what you made your little part of it look like. Clean lines and homogeny are not at all exciting, but they do help a brand define itself. When I picture my Twitter experience in my mind, I see my feed with my chosen background (a dunking otter!). I don't see Twitter's layout and color scheme. But when I think of Facebook, I see the layout, colors, and structure it wants me to see. I see exactly what the platform wants me to see.
To get a picture of what can go wrong when users have free reign over their social media profiles, look no further than MySpace (1.0). It let you personalize your profile to no end, adding obnoxious GIFs, videos, music files, whatever. Much of the site became an eyesore. There were many problems with MySpace, but one of the most obvious was the site's total loss of control over what it looked like, and the unnavigable mess many users made of it. Good luck trying to find the message button on a white page with yellow text overrun with twirling Lisa Frank stickers. I mean, look at this mess. Or this one. Or this one.
There's almost something Darwinian about it all: If users, given the freedom, turn a platform into a hideous monster, then perhaps it is only natural that it will die. Facebook's never risked it; the News Feed and user profile pages are now and forever will be locked down. But Facebook, to its credit, also never gave users the freedom to customize only to then take it back. Twitter's biggest mistake was in starting as a weird little corner of the Internet where we thought we could do anything, be anything, say anything, and look like anything, then incrementally revoking these freedoms until it seemed like little more than a real-time version of Facebook (which... even that is up for debate, I guess).
It's strange to see big social networks push branding over customization, because the entire point of a platform like Twitter is to curate your own Internet experience. Of course, Twitter isn't beholden to its users, and any assumption that it should play your wallpaper game is unfounded. It is a free service, after all. But perhaps the hidden price you pay for free social sites (aside from your data) is conformity. Different, yet familiar, products that kind of, sort of do the same thing and look the same way. Sterile and neutral—just like your new Twitter background.
