Twitter has added a new feature designed to make the microblogging platform more functional and easier to use. This new feature is called Moments and is designed to curate trending topics and keep track of breaking news.
What is Moments?
Depicted as a lightning bolt, Moments helps Twitter users in finding the “best of what’s happening on Twitter in an instant.” It continuously lists the latest trending topics and allows users to follow specific topics or stories so they can keep abreast with the latest developments on a particular topic in real time. These updates will be shown on the timeline.
Twitter’s Madhu Muthukumar, the product manager for Moments, posted a blog about this new feature and highlighted how Moments is bound to enhance the Twitter experience. According to Muthukumar, Moments is a good tool for finding “only-on-Twitter moments,” like conversations between word leaders and celebrities, even when a user is not following these celebrities. Basically, it allows Twitter users to selectively follow someone. Moments is already available for the desktop (Twitter.com) version of Twitter and will be available for the Android app on the next update, but only for users in the United States for now.
Using Moments
The Moments feature is accessed by clicking on the lightning bolt icon. A page labeled, “Today” then appears. This is just one of the tabs under the Moments feature. There are four other tabs, namely News, Entertainment, Fun, and Sports. They can be accessed by swiping left and right. A Moment (an item under a tab) is not shown like an ordinary tweet. It comes with an introduction, title, and description. Upon clicking on it, a stream of tweets appear.
As stories are posted, the tabs are automatically updated. Users can then check the different tabs for Moments or stories they might be interested in. For stories that tend to be updated more frequently like sports matches, an option to follow appears. All posts related to the followed story are then blended directly into the timeline.
Although Moments is only available for US users at the moment, all stories or tweets that have been curated under Moments are also accessible to non-US Twitter users. The interactions with these tweets haven’t changed. The difference is only in the presentation or curation.
Reinvigorating Twitter
Many share the opinion that Twitter is in trouble and that it needs something new to shoot up back into the kind of relevance it had in its prime years. The introduction of the Moments feature, so far, has been positively received by users and industry watchers. There are reports that Twitter can use Moments for revenue generation, through “Promoted Moments” designed to allow brands or companies to tell complete multimedia stories for marketing purposes.
Hopefully, Moments can help prevent Twitter from falling any further.
Image credit:By evandrodesouza [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons
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