Hot off the heels of Twitter announcing Jack Dorsey as its permanent CEO, comes another announcement – Twitter has a new feature called Twitter Moments. The feature allows users follow the most talked-about stories on the interwebs without having to follow anyone or a series of hashtags.
You’ll notice it’s nothing like Facebook Moments, the standalone Facebook app that lets users upload photos to a shared cloud where the algorithm facially recognizes subjects and share their picture with them. However, why Twitter had to go the way of “Moments” is still beyond me. That’s not why we are here though.
The feature is a new central tab on the the network’s Android and iOS app and on the web. But if you can’t see it yet, don’t fret, Twitter says it’s being rolled out gradually worldwide, so it might take a while before it gets to African countries. In fact, the feature is only available in the US as at the time of this writing.
Twitter hopes to attract a new set of users with the product, and that makes sense. Twitter has always been a bit challenging for social media noobs, and the network is currently in a difficult place in user growth and cashflow. This new feature will hopefully attract a whole new stream of users while attracting a whole new wad of advertisers’ money. Let’s hope the users do show up.
For existing users though, Twitter Moments is significant because it is an effective way to save time.
There.
The 24-hour stretch is already thinned out to be expended on following meandering conversations around a trending hashtag. Moments, which is curated by Twitter’s editorial team (a new team of curators led by former Al-Jazeera journalist, Andrew Fitzgerald) and publishers like BuzzFeed, Washington Post and a few others, rounds up the best tweets around the most-talked about conversation in a day and present them in neat slides on the tab.
What appears to be a downside is that users can’t customize Moments to their liking, but alas, this may be an advantage; one that allows a heavy user buried in one little sector of the internet to see stories from other sectors of the internet. So, make that two reasons why you should care about Twitter Moments.
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