Today, Twitter rolls out a new feature called “Moments.” It’s a tab that will collect the most buzzworthy news stories in one place. It’s a last-ditch effort to make the app easier to use at a time of changing leadership, plummeting stock prices, and stagnant user growth.
“Moments,” kinda sounds like a Caribbean resort akin to “Sandals,” but it’s actually an attempt by Twitter to attract new waves of casual social media users, The Verge points out. Moments will be available for Android, iOS, and web. You can click on a collection of tweets that you can swipe through on your phone, retweet, favourite, whatever. Stories are divided into categories, like a newspaper: News, Entertainment, Sports, the like.
There’s also a new “follow” button, which is useful during events like the Super Bowl or the Oscars. Follow an event, and the top tweets from those events show up in your timeline. Twitter’s partnering with media companies like Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, and the MLB. The Washington Post has announced their involvement with Moments, as well. There be lots of full-screen visuals, GIFs, and Vines, too.
Twitter’s had a rough go of it recently. Its stock prices reportedly sunk this year by over 18 percent, and freshly minted CEO Jack Dorsey is assuming leadership at a point in which Instagram has 80 million more users than Twitter. Twitter is over nine years old — an eternity in social media time — so hopefully Moments brings the user-friendliness and novelty needed to rope in new users and advertisers.