You’ve no doubt noticed the recent changes to your Twitter account. Gone is the ‘Mentions’ tab on the home page, replaced with a similar tab titled with your username. Previously this showed every tweet mentioning your username, but it now shows any users who have begun following you, any tweets of yours which have been favourited, any lists which you have been added to and which of your tweets have been retweeted, in addition to the regular mentions.

Alongside this is a new ‘Activity’ tab. Clearly an attempt to rival Facebook’s timeline of news, this new feature displays the favourites, follow, retweets and more by the people you follow. It has been met with mixed reactions, with thousands of people tweeting their dissatisfaction with the development. However, given that every change to Twitter’s hugely successful and, crucially, simple formula upsets the die-hard faithful this is no surprise.

The most notable concern of this change is how it has removed the ability to clearly see which of your tweets have been retweeted and by whom. That information is still there, it just takes a bit more digging to find it. Whether this will open up interest in third party applications is yet to be seen, but it’s certainly causing some consternation online. However, these tools have obvious benefits for Twitter’s business users. The fact that Twitter are developing their social graph will help advertisers in the same way Facebook does.

There is good news in amongst these changes though. This new layer of social activity helps you find more relevant information from within your social graph and adds a whole new dimension to Twitter. It is another step in encouraging interaction and awareness and whilst it remains separate to the present timeline it still allows Twitter to share some of the wealth of information it has about each of us. For those of us who are serious about discovering new conversations on Twitter it’s a valuable tool.