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Today: Twitter stock surges after social-networking company details planned changes to core service. Also: Cisco's earnings beat, but forecast disappoints.

The Lead: Twitter details future timeline changes, stock pops

Twitter laid out plans to augment its core service with new features Wednesday and painted a rosy picture of its future, leading investors to send the San Francisco company's previously ailing stock soaring higher.

Just more than a year after its initial public offering, Twitter held its first analyst day, welcoming men and women whose insights Wall Street trusts to the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco to lay out CEO Dick Costolo's plans for the social-networking service. As a wave of plans and projections flowed, investors showed their support by pushing Twitter stock up 7.5 percent to $42.54, the largest percentage gain among Silicon Valley tech companies Wednesday.

The impetus for that enthusiasm was a clearer picture of Twitter's future offerings. While the service's hard-core users live and die by the constant stream of real-time updates that have shaped Twitter to this point, Costolo and his executive team put forth their clearest picture yet of changes that are meant to attract new users who are not as continuously connected as the fervent fans.

"Anyone should be able to come to Twitter and feel deeply immersed in that world," Costolo said Wednesday.

For new and inactive users, Twitter will produce an Instant Timeline, providing rookies to the service immediate content that they can keep or use to begin customizing their experience by following specific accounts. Twitter says it has about 500 million people who visit the service but never log in or become active users, and hopes that a stronger initial experience could convert that wealth of potential customers into active users.

Converting Web surfers who occasionally browse Twitter into active users of the service is crucial for Twitter in Wall Street's eyes, with slowing growth in active users widely credited for Twitter's 33 percent stock decline so far this year. The paradox for Twitter is the difficulty in catering to new users while not angering those who already spend hours a day tweeting and accessing content on the service.

After facing heat just for suggesting a possible alternative to the reverse-chronology real-time stream of tweets that has defined the company during its existence, Twitter took a measured approach Wednesday, suggesting it will surface older content that a user missed while not on the service, a feature called Twitter Highlights. Such a service seems to offer infrequent users the ability to easily catch up while avoiding the ire of devotees who constantly seek fast updates.

Twitter will also look to expand breaking news push notifications to mobile devices, hoping to drive people to its service, and plans location-based feeds.

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Biz Break: Twitter details future timeline changes, stock rockets higher