Rumored in February and official today, Twitter's profile pages are undergoing a fundamental redesign. The Twitter blog has announced the changes this morning, noting that they're only effective for a select group of users for now, but will be rolled out globally in the coming weeks. If you really can't wait, you can sign up for a new account and the new look will be your default starting position.

Visuals have been growing increasingly important for Twitter and the new design pushes them even further to the fore, with larger background images and more prominent profile pictures. There's an unmissable similarity to Facebook's profile pages, with the user's photos and friends both being tucked into a tile layout on the lower left.

The original text-based social network goes for rich visuals instead

Other novelties include a size adjustment to tweets relative to how engaging they've been — your wittiest one-liners will appear larger in your Twitter feed. You can also pin one of your own tweets to the top of the page, which would function essentially as a status message or a more temporal way to present yourself than your profile bio. Finally, filtering tweets has been made an option when viewing others' profiles, with the site now allowing you to choose whether to just see basic tweets, tweets with photos and videos, or tweets and their replies from others.