Fare thee well egg avatar, we hardly knew ye.

The egg avatar, familiar to and beloved by millions upon millions of Twitter users around the world, is no more. Well, ‘beloved’ might be a bit of a stretch as it only appeared on accounts that were, for example, newly established, barely used or deliberately left without a profile picture so the person behind it could issue faceless abuse via a platform where spite is, unfortunately, a way of life. Seven years after it was first introduced to Twitter, the egg is being replaced by something incredible and amazing equally as mundane as its predecessor. Presenting the finished product… In a lengthy post detailing the reasons behind the change, Twitter outlined a few key reasons why they’ve disposed of the egg.

• Refreshing their brand and changing the default profile photo to help prompt more self-expression.
• An effort to encourage people to upload images that express themselves.
• An attempt to dispel the association between the default egg profile photo and negative behaviour, which Twitter says isn’t fair to people who are still new to Twitter and haven’t yet personalised their profile photo.

While the first two reasons seem fair enough, it is optimistic in the extreme to suggest that the new avatar is going to stop the negative behaviour they talk about from Twitter users without an identifiable profile photo. Explaining, fairly exhaustively we should add, how they arrived on the final design, meanwhile, Twitter said that they wanted it to have the following traits:

• Generic
• Universal
• Serious
• Unbranded
• Temporary
• Inclusive

Can you see all of those in the new avatar? Have Twitter cracked it with the egg replacement, or have they just gone with any old yolk? Twitter welcome any feedback on the design, which you can provide here.