While popular among celebrities, the social media platform is struggling, but Twitter aims to soar through Moments, their newest in-app addition that brings a sort of news feed for the users.
- Twitter is aiming to attract new and more active users
- Twitter Moments uses actual humans, instead of algorithms, to gather the best news possible
- The company is currently partnered with numerous publications
- Moments encompasses news ranging from sports, to fashion, and as far as entertainment
Twitter has been having a hard time monetizing on their services. Even though it’s considered a popular app with 300 million users, their growth has slowed down significantly, and its stock followed. When their problems were mixed with uncertainty in leadership, Twitter’s value decreased by a whopping 48.40%.
Now, with Jack Dorsey as the new chief executive officer (CEO), they hope that their new Moments features (previously dubbed ‘Project Lighting’), will bring life back to their platform. The project has been praised up and down ahead of its launch. Assumptions have been made and the company has managed to raise quite a lot of anticipation.
It’s finally here, and it presents itself as a magazine sort of feature, where users can peruse through 10 highlighted news of the day. Users can engage in common options, such as retweet, favourie, or embed, as they read through the articles covering topics from sports to entertainment. The catch is that they will not require to actually follow the original tweeters.
Almost instantly after its launch, Twitter’s Moments was compared to Snapchat Stories or even Google News. It’s meant to feature “best of what’s happening on Twitter”, but opinions are conflicted on whether it achieves its goal. According to some, Moments “doesn’t really look like Twitter”, and might give off the feeling of an entirely different platform.
As a company who is trying to improve and increase their user base, it’s not good news.
However, Moments does have its advantages. It does not use the multi-factor algorithms to curate news stories like Google News or Facebook News. Instead, it relies on the arguably better human factor. Twitter Moments uses a team led by former journalist, Andrew Fitzgerald, to collect attention-worthy articles.
What gets to the front of the feed has been decided by a team of humans, and not by a computer. According to Fitzgerald, they want to provide users with the best of the best. That can be achieved through a presentation of tweets “that are representative of a conversation”. What they believe will be best for their users, they will curate.
For now, Twitter is partnered with well known content creators such as BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Fox News, NASA, New York Times, Vogue, and several others to provide quality articles for their Moments. However, its success has yet to be decided, and the company still needs to find a way to monetize on their services.
Image source: aolcdn.com
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