Twitter's been spending a lot of time and effort enhancing the Twitter.com user experience, probably since a significant portion of Twitter users, especially new users who haven't chosen a third-party Twitter client yet, tend to use the Twitter.com website for accessing their tweets and posting tweets of their own. That's probably why Twitter created their latest feature, "hovercards," which should be hitting your Twitter.com feed within a couple of weeks.

The cleverly-named concept is so dead-simple, it's amazing that Twitter didn't think of it already. On any timeline, when you hover your mouse cursor over someone's @username or avatar picture, you'll get a sleek "hovercard" that pops up (as shown in the photograph) showing you some basic information about that user and giving you some quick actions you can take with that user, such as following them.

As Twitter pointed in their blog post about hovercards, one excellent use of the new hovercards is in retweets, when users often decide on the spot that they want to follow the original poster. The new hovercards feature means that you can now follow someone who's been retweeted simply by hovering over their username and clicking "follow" from the hovercard that pops up. Simple, right?

The new hovercard feature brings Twitter.com's functionality significantly closer to the functionality offered by many third-party clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck, where each tweet has a pop-up button bar that lets you perform common tasks like favoriting a tweet or following/unfollowing the sender.

As with nearly every new Twitter feature developed recently, Twitter's giving the hovercards feature a soft launch, slowly rolling it out to batches of users instead of blasting the new feature out all at once. That should give them the time to iron out any potential problems with the new feature, and make sure that it's 100% ready for mass consumption. You can check out twitter.com and see if you're one of the initial batch of users with hovercard functionality; if you're not, don't worry - you should be seeing it within a couple of weeks at the latest.

The hovercards feature is just the latest in a series of improvements to Twitter's main website, in a move possibly intended to bring some third-party Twitter users back into the Twitter.com fold and almost certainly intended to make new Twitter users more comfortable on the site, which has been oft-criticized as one of the worst ways to access Twitter's timelines. With a little luck Twitter will see the number of visitors to Twitter.com increase with this new feature, while simultaneously seeing a reduced stress on their servers due to the reduced number of pages that the new hovercards feature makes possible - if users don't have to browse to an entirely different page to view or follow a Twitter user, that means more time saved by both Twitter and the user in question - a win/win situation.