October 6, 2015: Twitter is approaching its 10th birthday in March, and the social media world has changed markedly since its inception. When created in 2006, Twitter saw immense growth and was first positioned as a refreshing, bite-sized version of the social king at the time, Facebook. Unfortunately, since its birth, the two networks (and every social network that’s launched since then) have been compared to one another in terms of content, size, and capability.
Recently, Twitter has seen a plateau in growth that has many wondering about the network’s future, especially since several other networks, including Facebook, are increasingly vying to be news and content sources.
The Evolution of Twitter
Trending topics was, at one time, the feature that set Twitter apart from competitors. Hashtags and topics that were being buzzed about were easy to find and jump on. But then Facebook caught up, adding a trend feature almost identical to Twitters to Facebook’s own pages as well as Instagram’s. Top-tier news sites also began to match Twitter by becoming more hip to breaking news and pushing their content through apps.
Today, while Twitter has retained its position as a “newsroom” for social media users, the average person isn’t likely viewing important tweets through the platform, but through other media sources such as TV and timely web articles. Because Twitter’s stream is so rapid and moves backwards in time as you scroll down, many tweets are hard to even view in context.
Fortunately, Twitter has made it clear that it’s willing to experiment with new features. The character limit—a feature that set Twitter apart from competitors and made it popular as a rapid-fire news source—is even being reconsidered. Just one day after the reinstatement of Jack Dorsey as CEO, Twitter has introduced Moments, a new curation tool that will make trending news stories even easier to read, follow, and share.
Image via Twitter Blog.
Test Driving Moments
The introduction of Moments comes from Twitter’s need to organize breaking news and trends into more readable, better contextualized information. Known through internet rumors as “Lightning,” Moments will be rolling out to both mobile and desktop.
On the app, you’ll notice the new lightning bolt tab on your homescreen. Now trending topics are presenting in a clean, full-bleed, organized tab where you can get caught up without sorting through your stream and scrolling endlessly. The tab includes all types of media tweets. You can also “follow” a moment if you have a particular interest in the story, and Twitter will add relevant tweets to your timeline/notifications.
Not only will Moments help prevent misuse of hashtags (we’re looking at you, Entenmanns), but it will encourage even more sharing and conversation among like-minded users. Moments will also launch with partners Buzzfeed, Entertainment Weekly, Mashable, MLB, The New York Times, and several other big name publishers. This will also probably be a big play for sponsored content.
Moments is definitely a refreshing start in the right direction for Twitter, and I’m excited to see whether it brings Twitter back into play as a site beyond the self-promoting “guru” garbage it’s devolved into recently.
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