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Aug. 9, 2016, 1:09 p.m.
Aggregation & Discovery
Audience & Social

Twitter has announced that in the “coming months” it will be rolling out its Moments feature for everyone to use and create their own tweet compilations. As of today, Twitter Moments is available for use by certain Twitter partners, brands, and influencers. Budweiser, Allure Magazine and activist DeRay McKesson are among the first to try out the new influencer-only Moments. The voices chosen for this early rollout were selected by Twitter’s media team.

By opening up Moments to everyone, Twitter is democratizing extended content curation on the website. News outlets could use Moments to aggregate relevant tweets and media surrounding specific events, issues, and subjects — sort of an on-Twitter Storify. Embedding Twitter Moments into articles allow for reporters to provide live updates and curated responses to the content.

Comparisons to Snapchat and Instagram Stories can be made; each attempts to build the atomic tweet/snap/insta into something larger and more narrative. But Twitter aims to be a more public space for stories compared to those of Snapchat and Instagram.

Twitter Moments do not appear to have had major impact on Twitter’s user base or earnings, but broadening the base of Moments creators — and vastly increasing the number of Moments created — could help Twitter bring a little more order out of the timeline’s chaos.

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