Need Twitter help

Bah.

I have enjoyed using Twitter both at home and while out playing poker. But I've hit a major snag that I can't resolve.

My phone is a crappy out-of-date thing, no question about that. Still, it's hardly the oldest piece of technology in use. It has a browser, but is really only happy with mobile-web optimized sites. That has been fine for Twitter; it connects to the mobile version of my home page, omits the photos and some of the options (like retweet buttons), but presents nice, clear, easy-to-read text.

A couple of days ago, though, something changed. It seems that Twitter changed the format of its mobile site. Now the messages appear much longer left-to-right, and to read one on my phone requires left-right scrolling back and forth, which is terribly awkward and time-consuming. I didn't have to do it previously; message lines were broken where they needed to be to fit on my screen.

It's bad enough that if that's what I'm stuck with, I'm basically done with using Twitter on the phone. Scrolling up and down the list of tweets was not and is not a problem, but left-right scrolling is. Not only does it take about four times as long to read each message, but the bad, bad design on my LG phone has the tiny scroll controls right on top of the "last page" and "reload" and "home" buttons, so when I try to scroll I often get one of those functions instead. It's maddening.

This is clearly the mobile version I'm seeing. There are no photos with people's names, and at the bottom of the page is the option to view mobile or standard. I am in mobile. I can switch to standard, and then the page view is the same as I see on my home computer (which just compounds my troubles). The page view is the same whether I go to twitter.com, m.twitter.com, or mobile.twitter.com (unless I specifically click the "standard" view button). In short, the problem seems to be that Twitter for some reason changed how its mobile page appears. Or maybe AT&T sent my phone some sort of firmware update that changed how the browser interacts with the Twitter page, though that seems less likely.

I have looked at the Twitter blog--no announcement about this. I have tried Twitter's mobile help section. Nothing. I tried sending messages to the Twitter mobile help team, and they are being ignored.

I have tried everything I can think of to get things back to the way they were. I don't know exactly what changed or why. I only know that it has taken Twitter on my phone from being a pleasant little diversion to being an experience so cumbersome and unpleasant that I will only attempt it when there is some compelling reason. This isn't a smart phone; I can't just download a different application to do Twitter.

I am soliciting help from my more tech-savvy readers, though frankly I'm not optimistic that it can be fixed.