Twitter Now Lets Everyone Create and Share Moments
Twitter opened up Moments Wednesday, allowing all of its users to create and share collections of tweets that are presented as slide shows within the Twitter app. This comes about a year after Twitter first introduced Moments.
The new feature will be available on the web today, and come to Twitter’s mobile app in the near future. Twitter officially announced the new functionality with a tweet featuring a short demo video:
For everyone who wants to make a Moment – starting today you can! Creators everywhere can now tell stories with Tweets. pic.twitter.com/ZJtNBoTPWf
— Twitter (@twitter) September 28, 2016
Moments are essentially collections of tweets that are being presented full-screen on mobile devices, using tweeted pictures and videos as art. Users can combine their own tweets to a Moment, or search for other tweets and essentially build a kind of curated collection around a certain topic.
User-generated Moments are being listed as part of a user’s profile, which should make it easier to go back and browse through past Moments. Twitter also is likely going to highlight Moments generated by the users you follow within the Moments guide of the Twitter mobile app. “We may choose to include Moments by our partners or ordinary customers in the guide if they meet our content guidelines,” a Twitter spokesperson told Variety Wednesday.
Twitter introduced Moments with fanfare in October of 2015, touting it as a way to make the service more approachable to casual and new users. The company has yet to release metrics on the use of Moments, but the feature did little boost Twitter’s stalling growth.
If anything, opening up Moments could spell trouble for third-party tweet aggregation services. Storify in particular has been popular with users looking for ways to curate collections of tweets, or make it easier to catch up on so-called tweet storms, a phenomenon during which a single user tweets out a large number of successive tweets to tell a story that can’t be told in 140 characters. With Moments being open to everyone, users will have a lot less incentive to rely on Storify for this kind of curation.
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