A day after Twitter announced co-founder Jack Dorsey's return to the company as its CEO, the company is rolling out Moments, a product better known before as Project Lightning.
The magazine-like view for Twitter is meant to represent the best of Twitter has for users, although the user is not following anyone.
Moments is available for both mobile and desktop, taking the form of a central tab. After more than 10 months of research and re-imagining the way users might want to use Twitter, Moments is the company's hopes to get more users, and getting the users that have abandoned it.
The Moments home is called Today. It offers the events and news in the form of tweets. Just like any other news app, it's a blend of topics that include politics, business, sports, entertainment and more. Users can swipe to see the other newspaper-styled sections to see more items. When users find something that interest them, they can tap on the item to see a "story" that consists of 10 or more tweets filling it. The stories combine text-only tweets, photos and videos - and those include from both Vines, Periscope and videos directly uploaded to Twitter.
For each tweet the users see, they can do the usual Favorite, Retweet and others. The gesture is a feature borrowed from Instagram.
"What we try to do is just immerse you in the content," said Madhu Muthukumar, Twitter's Product Manager for Moments. "Let's strip away some of the things that might be difficult for people: What do I search for? How does this work? Let’s just take the things we have and put them directly in front of people."
In short, Moments as Twitter's Manager for Moments describe, is the way Twitter looks tries to appeal to people who have either tried the microblogging site, and those who given up on it, and people who use it but wants better experience.
Twitter's Way To Even The Odds
Twitter is seeing its stock price plummets, and Moments arrives just at the right time. As the change of leadership from Dick Costolo to Jack Dorsey, Twitter is trying its attempt to again regain its former glory.
With users started to leave the microblogging service, and even more are becoming less active, Twitter continues to lose money. To generate the income it wants, Twitter needs to attract more millions of active users just to get advertisers attention to spend more money.
Previous Twitter's re-imagining began earlier in 2015 during a hack week when employees who worked at their day job are focusing on other projects. One of the results that came to success was making Twitter's timeline to stream football game and infuse them with the best tweets about the game.
Twitter do have a lot of good contents from many of its contributing users. But it lacks the ability to show those contents easily to those that really wants them. People are certain that there are better tweets about the things they want on Twitter other than what are presented to them, but they have no real way of finding them. The football game timeline that came from the minds of Product Designers Alli Dryer and Wayne Fan, has successfully brought commentary, stats, pictures and videos from an event, without the needs of users to know anything about who or what to follow.
A few days before Costolo's resignation, he revealed the prototype of Moments. The time was a rare instant for a company to announced new feature long before its release date. That time, Costolo was under pressure as he opt to deliver a radical change to the company.
Moments is more like a collection of tweets. Users just need to tap on the new lightning bolt tab on their mobile devices to open a list of moments Twitter has to give. They can be viewed in Twitter's app, shared via links, or embedded on external websites. Initially, Twitter is taking all the credits for itself, but it's also inviting media partners to make moments on their own.
The initial partners are: Bleacher Report, BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Fox News, Getty Images, Mashable, Major League Baseball, NASA, the New York Times, Vogue and the Washington Post.
Twitter expects its role in moments will evolve over time to emphasize curating moments over creating them. And soon, the company is hoping for more active streams of interesting events on users timeline, without the needs of users doing anything.
From Tech To Media
Twitter started its life as a 140-character microblogging site. By competing directly Facebook, Twitter is dwarfed. The company faces the challenge of both resources, pressure from investors to how to monetize what it has just to get users active. As the internet's speed increases and its reach widens, Facebook that has a lot more features thrives because of its superior ability in getting everything in one place.
Twitter excels is some parts if compared to Facebook. But it still needs a way to get things right, and putting what it has directly to those that really wants them.
"Every day, people share hundreds of millions of Tweets," said Muthukumar. "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."
Media is one of the growing industry as the internet is getting in more places. Moments is like putting media companies inside its sphere. Twitter has assembled a team of curators to organize and write editorial description for every moments posted.
If it sounds like Twitter is now running a media company inside a technology company, that’s because it is. The company put together a team of curators, led by , to package, organize and write editorial descriptions for every moment.
"We want to bring the best of what is happening on Twitter to users who might be new to Twitter, or who don’t use Twitter all that often," said one the leader of the curators, a former Al Jazeera and Current TV journalist Andrew Fitzgerald. "We want to highlight the best of what is happening on Twitter every day."
The finished product is similar to what Alli Dryer and Wayne Fan made, created with a temporary follow. Here users can follow things that interest them for as long as the event occurs. After it ends, the users' timeline will return to normal.
"The nice thing is they disappear," said Muthukumar.
To start, Twitter is introducing Moments to people in the U.S. across Android, iPhone, and the desktop web.