Well after what seemed like an extremely long wait, I must have been the last person to finally get New Twitter. So now I've been able to see for myself what all the fuss has been about.

The new design looks much more like an attractive dashboard, with a new large side panel making the most of the space unlike the old Twitter, which was a rather simple, if slightly basic, homepage with your feed and lists on the right hand side.

However the simplicity is still there with New Twitter, as 'Tweets, Mentions etc. can now be viewed from the dropdowns at the top of your feed, and instead your lists, followers, who you follow and trending topics have been made clearer in the larger side panel on the right hand side.

I like the fact that you can see the details of the tweets in the side panel without having to leave the page. When you click on a tweet, it shows more tweets by the same person, tweets with the same hashtag, users mentioned in the tweet, other tweets mentioning the user and also the tweet, that the tweet you've clicked on, is in reply to. One of the main annoyances with the old Twitter format was having to click to open a new tab or window to find out what the tweet was in reply to. So this makes it much easier to quickly see whole conversations.

However the only real negative change New Twitter has brought is an issue with Direct Messages. You now cannot see the number of direct messages you have received on your dashboard. So you have to go into your 'Messages' tab every time to see if you have a new DM.

As many predicted the new format allows you to view various forms of embedded media inside Twitter rather than clicking on links to elsewhere. Media from the Twitter apps such as Twitpic, Plixi (formerly tweetphoto), and yfrog can be viewed in a new panel situated next to your timeline, as well as perhaps the largest media provider Twitter have partnered with; YouTube.

You also do not have to click 'more' to load more tweets in your timeline, as it is now an infinite scroll. And you can also view previews of user profiles in the panel without having to open another tab or window to view it, which is again quite handy. It seems that Twitter want you to stay inside Twitter as much as possible. I wonder whether previews of shared links will be next to appear in the side panel? A bit like when you share links in LinkedIn.

New Twitter is still in preview mode, so you can switch back and forth to the new and old version for now, but it will not be long before it will be here to stay.

The question now though is whether New Twitter will affect the use of popular desktop apps? It was revealed by Twitter earlier this year that 60% of all tweets came from third party applications.

But with the new design it is now a much simpler user experience, as users are able to do almost everything from inside twitter.com. Downloadable desktop apps such as echofon, TweetDeck and Ubertwitter are used by Twitter users to make it more simple to navigate Twitter, but will users continue to use these apps when you can do what you need from the web interface. It's interesting to note that in New Twitter, the source of a users tweets does not appear in your timeline anymore, you need to click on the tweet to see the source of the user's tweets.

So maybe Twitter want users to stay inside the web interface from now on. Will you continue to use your desktop Twitter apps?