Twitter Launches Curated Collections Of Tweets As ‘Moments’

Just one day after Twitter named Jack Dorsey as its permanent CEO and Adam Bain was promoted to chief operating officer, the company has announced more big news with the launch of a new feature called “Moments.”

Moments are curated collections of Tweets, including text, images and videos, that are accessible by clicking the lightning bolt symbol in the bottom bar of the Twitter app or the top bar of the platform’s Web version. Moments are intended to be easily digestible stories that reflect timely news, sports and entertainment events, within the massive amount of information that exists on Twitter.

“Every day, people share hundreds of millions of Tweets,” said Madhu Muthukumar, product manager for Moments. “Among them are things you can’t experience anywhere but on Twitter: conversations between world leaders and celebrities, citizens reporting events as they happen, cultural memes, live commentary on the night’s big game and many more. We know finding these only-on-Twitter moments can be a challenge, especially if you haven’t followed certain accounts. But it doesn’t have to be.”

Initially, Moments are being curated by Twitter teams in both New York and San Francisco. Additionally, the company is allowing specific partners to post their own Moments, including Bleacher Report, BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Fox News, Getty Images, Mashable, MLB, NASA, The New York Times, Vogue and The Washington Post. Eventually, Twitter plans to extend that invitation to all of its users.

For example, on Tuesday of this week, the Moments that appeared on the desktop Web version of Twitter included “Explore the Galapagos Islands” tagged under “Tourist for a day,” “South Carolina floods break dams” tagged under “Weather,” “Corgi cuteness” under “Cute,” and “Seahawks hold off Lions for win” tagged under “Monday Night Football.” Additionally, several Moments were displayed that were tagged as created by partners, such as “Faces of the refugee/migrant crisis” by The Washington Post and “All-Day Breakfast at McDonald’s Starts Today” from BuzzFeed.

Moments contain a title and a very brief description to give context to what users will see unfold, and then use primarily visual Tweets (photos and videos) to tell the story in an order that makes sense, as opposed to appearing in reverse chronological order according to how the Tweets come up in the timeline.

The new feature is part of a larger push by the company to make Twitter more accessible to people who are not heavy users. As Dorsey tweeted this week, “Our work forward is to make Twitter easy to understand by anyone in the world, and give more utility to the people who love to use it daily.” Other members of the Moments team have said that the feature will help new users discover the “magic” of the platform.

There’s no question that Twitter has been struggling with its user growth for some time now, and the company hopes that features such as Moments will bring in a new wave of people to revitalize the social media network in the coming period.