Many social networking services out there allow users to string together posts to bring attention to them and to use them for storytelling, such as putting together all of your Snapchats of a recent vacation into a Story. Twitter’s answer to this trend is Moments, which allows users to put together a sequence of Tweets with a title, caption, and cover photo. These moments, at their inception, were mostly limited to the elite, Twitter staff, companies, and celebrities. However, Twitter has today announced that all of that is changing; everyday users, even those who have not managed to attain the vaunted “Verified Account” status, can now string Tweets together like beads to create their own moments.
The feature is fairly simplistic in its use. From their profile, users simply click over to the “Moments” view, then hit “Create New Moment” over on the right hand side. From there, they will be able to add in a title, a caption for said title, and a cover photo, then start picking Tweets to be part of the Moment. Each part of a Moment can also carry its own caption. There seems to be no limit on how many Tweets can go into a Moment, so everybody from a nervous teenager who makes it through their first date alive to an urban explorer stringing together hundreds of pictures and videos of a place untouched by humanity for decades, should be able to use the feature to get their point across.
The new feature is rolling out worldwide now and will continue to become available over the coming weeks, with a view to becoming available to all users on Twitter fairly soon. Once Moments are available to everybody, they are likely to become a common part of the Twitter experience in short order, since similar types of tools seem to do well on other social media platforms. However, whether new features like this will be enough to save Twitter from their user growth stagnation crisis, remains to be seen. Although it is certainly a step in the right direction, even if it does further agitate Twitter’s identity crisis between social media service, moment sharing service, and news service.