Before its birth, Moments was called “Project Lightning” and it’s growth was very slow when it came out on Twitter. The news tool consists on offering a group of relevant tweets about a trending topic. This was thought as part of the choice made by Twitter to become a news site and is one of the things that has distinguished the platform over all the others. However, the tool per se wasn’t very popular among the common users and that’s why Twitter chose to remove the option to create Moments from its app.
Ups and downs
At first, on october 2015 Moments was open to creators and influencers, then it opened up for brands and partners. Finally, on november 2015, it was made available for everyone, hoping to get into the market of user created content with something that would be original to Twitter. However, this particular tool never hit the popularity charts with the users. Moments is a great idea to keep all the information right from the source in one place (even more so, when the trending topic originated on Twitter), users, however, never cared to create their own “moments” in part because the tool seemed clunky and difficult to understand.
If it’s broken, fix it
Many users, more on the artistic side, complained that Twitter’s choice, instead of just fixing the problems, assuring that they used Moments to keep all their artistic posts in one place. This is quite the relevant information, given that Statista marks that 16% of Twitter users share art they did, which is pretty big number for a platform that is not inherently for art. Likewise, this options could’ve been a great news outlet for independent groups or niches, something we’ve already seen on Reddit, where millions of users login each day to search for news on very specialized topics, maybe it would’ve been a good idea to steer Moments towards that.
Not all is lost
Demonstrating that Twitter has at least some notion of the user’s needs, it has allowed the Moments tool to live through their browser website, and maybe this is where it will find its market, after all, it might be a titanic task to choose and curate content and information about a trending event from a smartphone. So, those who wish to keep using Moments, can do it in a more professional and dedicated way, without sacrificing quality.
Sources
www.wersm.com
www.twitter.com/twittersupport
www.statista.com