During Twitter's first earnings call as a public company in early February CEO Dick Costolo emphasized that his goal is "to reach every person on the planet."

"In 2014," he added, "we're focused on building a Twitter that is truly accessible and valuable to everyone." What better way to do that than by borrowing some of the look and feel from the social network that's come closest to that goal: Facebook.

Twitter unveiled a new design for profile pages on Tuesday with more prominent lead images and the option to choose a top tweet to display. As many, many users quickly pointed out, the design makes Twitter look that much more similar to Facebook. That might not be such a bad thing.

"If today's announcement makes the service more accessible for more people, then that's great news for Twitter," says Nate Elliott, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Twitter had 241 million monthly users at the end of the December quarter, less than a fifth of Facebook's user base, and its pace of user growth has slowed. That set off an alarm among investors. (Perhaps more troubling, third-party data suggest that millions of users have signed up for Twitter accounts only to stop using the service later).

"Twitter has to reignite growth," says Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner. "They've got to take these bold steps now."

Just in the six months since Twitter's high-profile IPO, the company has redesigned the desktop home page and profile pages, overhauled discovery features in the app to emphasize elements like conversations around television and it has introduced the option to upload more photos per tweet and tag users in them (a popular Facebook feature).

By making Twitter a little more like other popular social networks, the company may reduce the learning curve for users as well as for marketers and be able to piggyback on some of the success that its competitors have had. Case in point: Twitter has broadened its ad retargeting program, similar to Facebook. It is also reportedly planning to roll out 15 new ad products over the next six months, including app-install ads, a format that has reaped dividends for Facebook.

"They are trying to make it more social, appealing and comfortable for users, but keep what's unique about Twitter," Blau says. "The risk is that it just becomes a little more homogenous, verses going in the other direction, potentially into the domain of being unusable."

If Twitter is actively trying to imitate some of Facebook's features, that puts it in good company. Facebook has adopted several popular Twitter features over the years and is currently trying to take a page from Twitter's social TV playbook.