[sulam]

The logged out user experience was a topic of discussion since before I joined, and I spent over 4 years there and have been gone for almost 2. This is the real problem Twitter has internally -- lots of interest in improving things, but no intestinal fortitude to ship things, especially if they don't A/B test well. The logged out home page you see tests very well at one thing and one thing only: getting people to login. What it doesn't test well at (and no alternative demonstrated better performance at) is getting people who don't care about Twitter to try it.

My personal hypothesis is that Twitter is a ~500M user niche social network. Which sounds absurd to me, because when I started using the Internet there were ~15M people online, total. But there it is.