Bold move. Twitter and Snapchat continue to converge. Moment's full bleed presentation of timely events is a lot like Snapchat LIVE. According to @ow's article on TNW, Twitter will also feature moments from partners like Buzzfeed, Entertainment Weekly, Fox News, Mashable, and others.
I'm a fan. Looking forward to playing with it later today. Here's an example of a sharable Moment.
@justmadhu embeddable moments is 🔥. I recently spoke with someone on the Twitter dev team and they mentioned their push toward more embeddable widgets and content. This makes a ton of sense, giving you (Twitter) more control of the presentation/experience and data. Maybe I should buy Twitter stock now. 😁
@rrhoover Thanks Ryan! We love embedding Tweets and Moments! We always want to make sure that when you Tweet, we've done our best to get you the largest possible audience possible across any app or website!
Super dig these and love the presentation, it's just quite disappointing that Twitter is restricting it to US-only at launch. I'm loving the idea of using these for things like Apple Events, to curate tweets and offer a way to slot them into people's timelines temporarily -- could really help reduce the noise.
@robjama@ow We thought long and hard about launching in Canada - the engineering team is disproportionately Canadian, but we wanted to test in the US first where we had more on the ground expertise. Also, we weren't ready to deliver a multi-lingual experience at launch.
@blackmad@ow But what about people who read in English anyway, would love to be able to opt in order to get the tab. I'm in France but I consume contents mostly in English. Other than that, I love the interaction design!
@blackmad@ow That's fair. The feature looks awesome! I wonder if it would have helped to soft launch it quietly instead of a public post and press push or soften the blow a bit by announcing rough timelines for different regions like Apple does.
My knee-jerk thoughts (totally biased as I used to work for Twitter and worked on a precursor to this idea, back in 2011-12).
1) At last! Great to see Twitter finally play in the arena it's meant to be in: curation and shining that big ol' bird-shaped spotlight. Interesting to see this with the launch of Upvoted today http://www.producthunt.com/tech/... Community-powered journalism threw some great one-two punches today. I think this will be great helping people see why Twitter is special and unique, and really: they couldn't afford to wait any longer with the advances SnapChat and Instagram have made in this area.
2) It's so so late, and maybe unforgivably so. 2 years ago, all people were doing from The Emmys or Oscars was tweeting. Now they're SnapGramming and that's valuable content that would have been on Twitter a couple years ago. Now SnapChat, Instagram/Facebook, and Twitter are in a horse race specifically around live events and generating the most "news" out of their communities.
3) To every journalist who bemoans this, or worries about journalistic ethics, or the vagueness in this Guidelines and Principles document: https://about.twitter.com/compan... they don't realize that Twitter is a business, and needs to develop its product and serve itself. This is different that news orgs, that supposedly have a responsibility to tell the truth and inform the public.
4) That being said about news orgs, I'll be sad if Moments remains a closed garden. I wrote about this on Instant Articles, but it applies here too: "It’s as if Facebook and Snapchat [and now Twitter] are trying to become more like a TV model. TV dominated for almost 100 years, but it was never truly accessible for letting the masses broadcast what they wanted. Yes there was/is public access TV, but the barrier to entry was restrictive enough. So when the Internet came along, it was accessible — instantly. People flocked to it, because it was open and because they could do what they want and reach other people with the same tools. It seems weird to me to take a platform that succeeded because of its openness and restrict it. You are shooting yourself in the foot, limiting your potential." https://medium.com/@mischa/on-fa...
^ Yes I just quoted myself. D-bag move? Probably. But I love to nerd-out on this media stuff.
@mischa thank you for your sobering comment here. Twitter didn't have to play catch up in this area but now they are when they had the opportunity first years ago.
@mischa Moments isn't a walled garden at all. We are inviting partners like BuzzFeed, MLB and Washington Post to make their own Moments (all featured today)! In the future, we're going to open the tools up to more and more people.
Syndication, Logged Out or Logged-In -- Moments will be available :)
@justmadhu Thanks for responding, but it's still a walled garden unless you open it to all users to craft their own moments, whether that user is big or small. For now: you'll do what you should, which is to cherry pick the best Twitter curators. Might be different if you find a way to highlight regular users' collections without giving them access to the Moments CMS, but still highlight them in the Moments section. This is how you can highlight people who do factchecking, and want to keep the public informed and can take a stance on something Twitter might not want to or be able to (like a Twitter shaming moment, or death hoax).
@justmadhu@mischa Centralization of curation is still a walled approach. I get it from a business angle. Tough from a philosophical one. But that's the line we all tip toe around. No easy answer.
@urbnist@mischa Agree. Why not make it accessible to all as a format to use? Hasn't curated media clearly been outdone by live streaming and Snapchat? Open it up to your top 1M tweeters and see what magic they can make. Then decide if you want it for select users only. I think you're baking in selection bias into your product rollout.
You want this product to be a Snapchat story, not a Facebook Canvas Ad.
Twitter just announced that Project Lightning - now called Moments - will launch today on iPhone, Android and web. ⚡️ Excited! ⚡️
Edit: Just learned this feature will be US only for now. Honestly, why?
@juanbuis We wanted to make sure this is delightful and excellent... and it takes a lot of work to get that right.
For our friends around the world, you'll still be able to click into Moments and see them embedded around the web. We're working hard to get this to as many countries as we can with a high quality bar.
@juanbuis I honestly think it's so sad that most new feature launches are US only. Why not switch it up sometimes and do an UK only launch, EU launch or even Asia launch for example?
@magnusburton@juanbuis Given that we're primarily US team, our expertise and experience leading up to launch was around US topics. We spent months testing both the curation and design/technical aspects of moments - to feel it in our hands and understand what was working and what wasn't, the stories had to be content we were familiar with. By building up our content strategy/guidelines in the US, we have a template that we can start from and localize as we launch in other countries.
Great work, @justmadhu, @allidryer, @wwayneee, @blackmad, and the rest of the Twitter team. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, this feels more like Snapchat which I think is a good thing.
Moment's fullscreen, "slideshow-like" presentation is almost the antithesis of what Twitter started as: a scannable, text-only feed of 140 characters. How did you decide on this presentation vs. something more condensed?
This is lists on steroids! Would love to see this feature be customizable for each user. I don't care about most of the topics currently. There is so much long tail news on Twitter let the users decide what they want to get.
Hey all, we've got our hands full right now, but I'm looking forward to chatting with folks here over the course of the day.
Feedback, questions, comments, suggestions -- let 'em rip!
@justmadhu one biggest differentiators of Moments is its ability to be live embedded. I am excited to see how publishers use the feed. (Here is how it looks for those who haven't seen) https://www.washingtonpost.com/n...
@rstephens For now it's our internal team and a small set of partners. We're iterating on the tools and looking forward to getting them out to more people.
I love moments. The balloon animation is cool but unnecessary IMHO. I think all new twitter signups should automatically follow @MagicRecs and @TwitterMoments. It would be a 2015 version of my @MySpace's Tom but provided constant value.
@allidryer@wwayneee great design work guys! I'm a huge fan of tile / cards as a way of digesting information, especially when trying to make instinctive decisions regarding content!
One of my great frustrations with Twitter currently is it takes too long to understand what a content based tweet to a news article etc. This tells me exactly what's going on with auto playing videos etc, without the painful process of clicking through, waiting for a browser to load, then going back to Twitter again.
Please throw this across the pond the UK asap! Early adopter here waiting to scream about it!
Love the editorial curation aspect of this -- once @Digg set the stage people started figuring out that it's not all about algorithmic curation, but the combination of computers and human editors.
Ultimately how Twitter surfaces this content in-app (desktop web, and mobile) will be really interesting to see. That's where the boldness comes in methinks. Will moments be suggested next to a tweet that shows in-feed with a moment-related url? Or only in a separate area of the app?
I wonder how big this gets, and if it does, if it will pose any cannibalisation risk to the sharing of links. I.e., how will people retweet / share moments? And what effect will this have on story consumption and sharing, and how will this affect services like @Digg Deeper and @Nuzzel?
Exciting stuff! Congrats to the team that built this! Please make a beautiful Twitter conversation reading tool as well 😍
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