The Twitter status blog has announced that when “one of the folks you follow has tweeted since you loaded your homepage, you’ll get a little notice saying “1 new tweet” that, when clicked, will display the new content.”

That’s the “small” kind of feature add that really pleases a longtime user such as myself. Twitter search uses this kind of functionality to alert users when new search results are available. And the nice thing is that it allows you to refresh the page whenever you’re ready, instead of simply auto-loading new updates, which can be annoying to some. MG Siegler at TechCrunch notes that Twitter used to do the auto-update thing, until the explosion in the microblogging platform’s popularity forced them to kill it off.

And credit Mashable for grabbing a screenshot of the new feature seen in the “wild.”

(this piece was first published on Technorati)