Twitter has been given a significant overhaul in an effort to make the site easier to navigate and provide new functionalities, so V3 has taken a closer look at the changes to see how the new site compares to the original.

The first thing you'll notice is that your profile and news feed have been swapped around, so you'll need to get your bearings. The colour scheme has been changed to a darker shade of blue and Twitter has also culled a lot of tabs.

There are now three running along the top: Home, Connect and Discover. There's also a Profile icon on the far right that brings down a drop menu, and next to it is the Tweet button with a feather that allows you to instantly send a message.

The new Twitter:

The old Twitter:

The Connect tab allows you to search for other Twitter users and see whether anyone has mentioned you, messaged you, retweeted you or started following you.

Meanwhile, the Discover tab provides tweets based on your interests, current location, what you follow and events taking place to help you get more out of the site's non-stop flow of messages.

Taking a page out of YouTube's book, Twitter has added the ability to embed tweets. This allows users to post a tweet on a web site by pasting a line of code. Twitter users can then follow, reply, retweet or 'favourite' the tweet without visiting Twitter.

Meanwhile, companies can also enhance their profile pages to attract followers and promote services. There is the freedom to put a larger logo and header, and show pictures and links in a more prominent display. This is a nice touch that allows businesses to differentiate their profiles on the site by making them livelier.

The update is being rolled out across the desktop site over the next few days, while the mobile version, which incorporates the Discover and Connect tabs, is now available for all users, according to Twitter.

Bitdefender has launched a security tool that allows Twitter users to scan contacts to see whether they pose a security risk.

Bitdefender Safego is described as easy to use and quick to deploy, although the company said that there is still a lot of development work that needs to be done before the app is taken out of its current beta state.

The tool allows Twitter users to sort through existing and potential contacts with a four-colour code based on the severity of the potential threat.

Red signifies a highly suspicious account which may be spreading malware, spam or phishing attacks. Yellow highlights contacts that pose moderate threats, although Bitdefender is unclear what an account has to do to be in this class.

Grey indicates contacts that have not sent any messages from their accounts for 30 days, and green signifies contacts that run safe accounts.

V3 tested the tool on one of its accounts, and was pleased to find that all the followers Bitdefender had scanned were marked as green or grey.

However, while the account in question follows 157 people, the tool scanned only 40 and presented colour codes for just 16.

V3 clicked on the 'See All' tab next to the 16 coloured contacts and, although the software said that it will scan more users, it did not. The alert at the top of the web page still confirmed that only 40 contacts had been scanned, and there were still results for only 16 users.

V3 asked Bitdefender why it was scanning so few accounts, and feeding coloured results back for even fewer.

"In order to optimise speed, Safego is initially scanning only a small amount of users, and after that is using the background scanner to scan the rest of the followers in a silent way," said the technical team at Bitdefender.

However, while there are obvious problems with Bitdefender Safego at the moment, more development and focus could make this app invaluable to Twitter users trying to fight the growing amount of spam on the social network.

One of the app's most useful features is the New User Check-up function, which determines whether prospective contacts' accounts are safe to follow.

Twitter has announced a series of updates to be rolled out in the coming weeks designed to provide more information on account activity akin to the Facebook feed.

The first update will see the @mentions column change to @yourname (e.g. @V3_co_uk) to include information about @ replies and updates that the user has posted which have been 'favourited', as well as retweets of messages and recent new followers.

The second update will see a new tab labelled 'Activity' that will show information on the interactions of other users on the site, including who they've followed, messages they've retweeted and messages they've 'favourited'.

The updates will bring more of a Facebook feel to the site by providing a constant stream of information relating to the user and the accounts of other users as Twitter continues to add new functionality.

The company confirmed on Tuesday that users can now directly upload photos to the site, rather than having to use a third-party client such as TwitPic.

V3 recently listed our favourite 100 Twitter users in 10 categories, including security experts, celebrities, comedians and MPs, which you can find under our dedicated Top 100 Technology Tweeters tag.

Twitter has begun rolling out an image uploading service after announcing the feature at the D9 Conference in San Francisco in June.

Users will now be able to upload photos directly from Twitter, rather than using third-party services.

Just as tweets are restricted to 140 characters, the photos will be limited to 3MB.

Depending on the size of the photo, it will take up a chunk of a user's 140-character tweet and, once posted, will be scaled to fit the display pane on the right of the Twitter timeline.

The big question is whether this new service will spell the end for TwitPic, which has run a photo-sharing service for Twitter users since 2008, and turned down a $10m acquisition offer two years ago.

Twitter's photo sharing service is pretty easy to use. Underneath the message box, users will see a camera icon, next to the compass icon, where they can upload photos from the device they are using.

A thumbnail of the image will appear in the lower left corner of the message box, and the character count will decrease according to the picture's size.

Twitter said that it will add a media gallery function in the coming weeks to show images that have been shared from Twitter's new image upload service or from third-party photo sharing services.