Twitter Launches New ‘Moments’ Feature, Australia Doesn’t Hate It
Fresh from the ill-fated favourite-to-like button change on Twitter, which had loyalists in a violent rage, the social media platform has launched a new Moments tab today – and it’s actually not terrible.
The Moments feature sits between the ‘Home’ and ‘Notifications’ buttons and offers an easier way to discover trending content and keep tabs on breaking news and live sport.
New to Australia!⚡️ Find the best of Twitter in an instant with @MomentsAU: https://t.co/igSAzOfUrF ⚡️⚡️ #MomentsAU pic.twitter.com/p4XrJzoSUk
— Twitter Australia (@TwitterAU) March 1, 2016
Different from the previous Discovery tab on Twitter, which was dependent on who you follow and trending hashtags, Moments are a more concise collections of tweets, images and videos from Twitter that have been hand-selected to tell a story or follow an event.
Moments are organised into four categories – news, sports, entertainment and fun – along with a default ‘Today’ screen on top, showing the latest and most important breaking news moments.
Twitter Moments has launched in Australia. Pretty interesting. Looks like an attempt to deliver news, concisely and on the Twitter platform.
— Osman Faruqi (@oz_f) March 1, 2016
https://twitter.com/BenCuzzupe/status/704812415095943170
Australia is the fourth country to get access to Moments, it’s already been rolled out in the US, Britain and Brazil. International stories will make their way to Australian Moments users but Twitter says it will focus on home-grown stories and more localised content.
Like tweets, Moments can be shared, linked to or embedded, and people can follow those links to see the full Moment. It’s actually pretty darn handy.
Only catch is that Twitter will also authorise local partners to be able to curate and publish their own, so far this includes the ABC, BuzzFeed, the NRL, the AFL and The Project. Additionally companies will also be able to pay to create “sponsored” moments. Evil geniuses.