Ever since it launched Moments last October, Twitter has been constantly tweaking its latest major feature and seems to absolutely love experimenting with it. It’s also a never-ending struggle for the company to find an optimal way for its users to experience the most important stories from all around the globe, which is basically what Moments is – a live collection of top trending stories curated by the most popular microblogging platform on the planet. Now, just five weeks after the dropped registration requirement for Moments, Twitter announced that it has found a way to make the process of exploring links within them easier for end users.
More specifically, the social media platform now allows you to tap on a link leading to an external source – an article, a news piece, anything – directly from the Moment display. After checking out what’s on the other side of the flashy Moment cover, you can easily go back to the Moment you originally saw with just another tap of a touch screen button. This new feature isn’t unlike the recently launched Facebook Instant Articles or even the way most unofficial Reddit apps handle aggregated content. However, one big difference is that the new and improved Twitter Moments have support for all websites powered by the Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) open standard which has been gaining momentum in recent months.
Up until now, viewing the actual source material of Moments was significantly more complicated: the Moment display only led you to the original tweet picked by Twitter, which you had to tap again, which would then load the actual source; naturally, without AMP support. So, this is definitely a big improvement of the entire process. Not only will people now have a better user experience with Moments, but the latest Twitter update will also make finding and surfacing content more convenient for publishers, meaning that they’ll have less trouble with providing their audience with the most relevant content possible. The Twitter app update which includes AMP support and other features is rolling out at the moment, so don’t panic if you have not seen it arrive just yet – it is coming.