Twitter eggs are bad news so the company got rid of them

The day before April Fools isn't the best time to make big announcements, but that's not stopping Twitter from dropping some big news. The social network revealed its new default profile picture today, an icon that looks more like a real person and gets rid of the egg. Originally, the idea was that new Twitter users would hatch into birds before sending tweets. Of course, the egg took on a negative meaning associated with trolling and other sorts of not-so-great activity.

The company detailed the change in a blog post where it explains the rationale for switching up the icon to something that resembles a person. However, there's some interesting rationale at work here.

"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," the post explains. "We reviewed many variations of our figure, altering both the head and shoulders to feel more inclusive to all genders." Twitter says it settled on a more neutral gray color scheme to give less prominence to account with a default photo. They're less like to stand out in your timeline than those colorful eggs. Of course, if you really wanted to use the old profile pics, there's not anything anyone can do about it -- except mute or block you.

Yesterday the service announced it was removing @replies from the 140-character limit -- a change users are still getting used to. Earlier this month, Twitter started allowing users to mute any accounts with the default avatar so you can still keep those folks out of your feed should the need arise. For now, we're off to sort out our new profile pics.