So there has been a lot of buzz this week revolving around the launch of the new Twitter home page, which features trending topics that are hot at the moment, hot for that current day, and hot this week, as well as a hot this month.  But more importantly Twitter’s home page is now dominated by a search feature.  The new focus on search has people talking about Twitter being the next big thing in search when it comes to real time search and discovery engines, but in all honesty I don’t think it means a damn thing.

Sure it’s fancy, it shows trends and it’s NEW, but how many of you are actually using twitter.com to do anything that involves twitter?  Most serious twitter users are using programs like TweetDeck.  I personally use Twitterfox while on the computer and UberTwitter on my Blackberry.  The only time I ever visit Twitter.com is to add or remove people.  Unless you are visiting Twitter’s website everytime you manage your tweets I don’t see this feature being used too often.

Overall I think, much like everything in the search and social community, it’s new, it’s shiny, and it’s something to get overly excited about.  But there really isn’t any true value there yet.  Real time search is only really good for news and entertainment at the moment and even then there is no control over the value and relevance of the content presented.  On the flipside if you’re doing buzz monitoring or monitoring your brand you might find some value in this newly revamped homepage, but honestly I don’t think it’s worth the hype its getting.

What are your thoughts?  Have you used the new Twitter homepage?  Did it add any value to your Twitter experience?