In July, it was reported that Twitter is launching a curated news service that was previously named as Project Lightning . Periscope’s CEO, Kayvon Beykpour leaked that information to the Telegraph back then and described it as a visual pulse of what is happening around the world. Twitter has finally announced it, calling the feature Moments as previously announced and it is exactly what the Periscope CEO explained it would be.
New! Find the best of Twitter in an instant with Moments: https://t.co/QAKGUSVBbT pic.twitter.com/KAjfkysVKC
— Twitter (@twitter) October 6, 2015
Just as announced before, there is a new button to access Moments ( it is now a very convenient lightning bolt) which when you click, you are immersed with the latest stories that are composed of full screen images, autoplaying videos, GIFS and Vines. After clicking on the lightning bolt, you are taken to the Moments UI which are grouped according to various categories.
On tapping on a specific moment, you can see the full view of the tweet and a progress bar at the bottom indicates the progress of the particular moment. Swiping up or down will take you back to the Moments page so that you can view others. In a case where a story that is updated constantly like a football match, there is an option to follow the moment which enables you to be updated in real time by integrating the tweets in your timeline.
Most of these moments are curated by a dedicated team and others are contributed by media partners like Buzzfeed, Mashable, NASA, Washington Post and others. Twitter says that they will expand the list in the future. This makes Twitter compete directly with Snapchat where the latter’s Discover platform shares the same partners who post content on it. This new feature is targeted for two sets of users: First time users who find it hard to keep up with what is happening on Twitter and for the regular users to be able to keep up with specific bits of information.
Unfortunately this great feature is only being rolled out in the US on the Android and iPhone apps as well as the web. However, you can be able to access these moments if you are able to discover their specific links. Countries outside the US will get the new update in the coming months.
