Twitter is getting rid of its iconic egg avatar. The micro-blogging site is changing its default egg profile photo and replacing it with a new non-gender specific silhouette photo.
For the past seven years, everyone who has created an account on Twitter starts out with their default profile photo as an egg. Twitter said it was time to change the default profile photo asa it wants to encourage people to upload images that express themselves. The micro-blogging site also acknowledged that in recent years, the anonymous Twitter egg has become associated with abusive and harassing behavior on the social network.
Twitter wrote in a blog post,
Regardless, people have come to associate the circle head with masculinity, and because of this association, we felt that it was important to explore alternate head shapes. We reviewed many variations of our figure, altering both the head and shoulders to feel more inclusive to all genders. When the shoulders were wider, the image felt overly masculine, so we decreased the width of the shoulders and adjusted the height of the figure. As a result of these iterations, we ended with a more gender-balanced figure.
Just yesterday, Twitter removed @replies from its 140-character limit.