Twitter Updates Moments Hoping To Offer A Better Experience

By @TheMarkDalton

The rollout of Twitter’s Moments tab has been agonisingly slow. At the moment it is still only available in four countries and Ireland is not one of them. The USA, UK, Brazil and now Australia (launched this week) are the only places in the world at the moment where Moments is available. 

However, by the sounds of things we have not missed out on much so far. The feature has failed to encourage user growth as Twitter had hoped it to. The intention is that Moments will highlight the best of Twitter in a magazine style format so that you can catch up on trending topics quickly.

Today, Twitter is rolling out support for AMP-powered web pages when available. While we don’t have Moments ourselves yet, this feature is important to take note of none the less because it signals the intent Twitter has to redirect traffic to the source website where content has originated from.

Twitter users who have Moments will now be able to tap a link in the app and they will be taken to the website. When they are finished browsing they can return to where they left off in the Moment with a single tap.

It is a notable step as to how Twitter wants to work with publishers. Unlike Facebook Articles where a page loads instantly, everything is directly hosted on Facebook. However Twitter wants to direct traffic back to the publishers website and as any publisher or content creator knows, that is a big deal.

Twitter has been participating in Google’s open source AMP project for some time now. The idea behind the project is to accelerate the web on mobile devices by using a new framework called AMP HTML.

The end result is a lightweight webpage which is not bogged down in code and still allows publishers access to tools they need such as analytics and ads. Pinterest, LinkedIn and WordPress are just some of the big names also participating in the AMP project.

A lot of publishers have also gotten on board with AMP such as Buzzfeed, Mashable, BBC, New York Times and more. We don’t know when Twitter will decide to roll out Moments on a large scale. It is being pushed as a main feature of the Twitter experience now so I would imagine it will arrive at some point in the future.

Up to now the rollout has taken place in areas where Twitter have establish teams to curate the content so that local users will see stories relevant to where they live. However this is not something that would be practical all over the world, Twitter won’t be setting up content curation teams in every country Moments rolls out to.

More than likely we will see a generic global form of Moments rolled out to a large number of countries at some point which will be updated with global news and not curated to the region the user is living in.