Twitter launches its new important feature, Moments
Twitter launched Moments, formerly known as Project Lightening, in the US yesterday. Madhu Muthukumar, a Product Manager at Twitter, described Moments as "just tweets in a row", its a curated collection of tweets, images and videos. Moments has been designed to turn conversations and events on Twitter into something that is easily readable and retrievable, helping people better understand Twitter. These aggregated M﻿oments will cover entertainment as well as the news. The expectation is that this feature will help Twitter grow, as well as retaining users. Moments also provides Twitter with new monetising opportunities, since it is expected that Twitter will allow companies to sponsor M﻿oments.  

A few months ago, a team at Twitter began to test a new feature. Codenamed Project Lightning, this project was an attempt at making Twitter easier to understand, especially if you're not a power user, or new to the platform entirely. "When you jump into Twitter," says Madhu Muthukumar, a product manager at Twitter, "things are already mid-stream. Because you're not on Twitter most of the day. So when you get there, the odds that something started the second you got there is low." Internally, they thought providing a better sense of context and history might go a long way toward getting people up to speed.

Right after they got a prototype running, a story began to unfold. A confusing story. Happening almost entirely on Twitter, with huge ramifications for a thing—NBA basketball—a lot of people care about. It started with Chandler Parsons tweeting an airplane emoji, just as members of the LA Clippers began to track down All-Star center DeAndre Jordan, barricading themselves in his house until he agreed to remain with his current team. All the public saw was a bunch of emoji, and the picture Paul Pierce tweeted because apparently Paul Pierce has never used a smartphone. The tweets were later rounded up and shared on every sports site and TV show on the planet, but Muthukumar and his team saw the story unfolding differently.

They were looking at Moments, the official name for what came of Project Lightning. Coming to Twitter users in the US beginning today and around the world soon, Moments are, as Muthukumar says, "just tweets in a row." They're curated collections of tweets, images, videos, anything you can find on Twitter today. Everything is full-screen, with big images and video. Moments have beginnings and endings, and can change and evolve over time. Mechanically, they feel a lot like Snapchat Discover, except you follow stories instead of brands. Moments are a respite for people who'd otherwise waste time furiously refreshing their timeline, and far more importantly, they're a way to use Twitter for people who don't get Twitter at all.

Twitter

A small team at Twitter is making Moments now, but soon every one of its 300-million-plus users will be able to. Moments are designed to turn conversations and events into something readable and retrievable, and to help people wade into the bristling chaos of Football Twitter or Oscars Twitter or #superbloodmoon Twitter, and feel like they're part of the conversation.

Moments are very much the future of Twitter. It's no accident that they're being rolled out publicly the day after Jack Dorsey was made the company's permanent CEO, nor is it insignificant that Moments will sit dead center in Twitter's navigation bar. Twitter needs to grow; it needs to make more money; it needs to recapture its place at the center of the world's conversation, a lofty pedestal assaulted from all sides by those like Facebook with much larger user bases and war chests. It needs to be easier to use for everyone, especially those who can't or won't spend hours curating the perfect timeline. Moments is the answer to all of those things.

The timeline's not dead, but make no mistake: From now on, for most people, Moments is Twitter. Twitter is Moments.

What's happening?

"There's a very long-lived theme internally," Muthukumar says, "about how we get the very best content to people. How do we organize the content on Twitter, and start showing it to people in a way that they can easily find it?" From the ill-fated Discover tab to the more recent (and more useful) While You Were Away feature, Twitter's been working on this problem for years. It's still arguably the place where most news breaks, where you can see first-person stories the world-over unfolding. It's all there—if you can find it. "But to do that," Muthukumar say, "you have to do a little bit of work."

To explain, Muthukumar taps on the lightning bolt icon in the center of his iPhone's Twitter app to launch Moments. When I mention that I'm glad the lightning bolt is still there (and that Project Lightning is a way better name than Moments), he laughs. "We really do love the Lightning bolt a lot," he says. "It's been at the heart of everything that we do, we really love it." They even tested a version of Moments called Lightning. "Turns out it confuses the hell out of people." Nobody knew what it meant—some users thought it indicated weather news.

Moments does two things. First, it gives stories and tweets a longer, more coherent life. Rather than flowing off your timeline or interspersed with memes and jokes, it pulls things into a single place where you can see it—and access it again later. But it's also a way to inject yourself into the path of the firehose in a more manageable way. If you're watching a football game, or the latest episode of Empire, you can opt to follow the moment around those two events. That will inject a real-time feed of good tweets into your timeline around that event; in the case of a football game, it was the feeds of both teams, broadcasters, other players, and the NFL itself."