Twitter Extends "Moments" and Will Eventually Open it to All Users

[engine]

Twitter's Moments is being rolled out further, but only to more "selected partners", although it says it'll be extending that to all users in the coming months. Moments allows the partners, and eventually all users to "tell a story" in more than a single tweet.

Today, we’re excited to announce that a broader group of creators will be making Moments, including influencers, partners, brands… and in the coming months, everyone. Twitter Extends "Moments" and Will Eventually Open it to All Users [blog.twitter.com]

On the twitter blog there are some links to example stories on Moments, and it sure does show you how different a tweet will be.

Previously on Moments
Twitter To Test "Promoted Moments" With Selected Partners In U.S. [webmasterworld.com]

[Robert Charlton]

"Moments" looks like an updated commercial version of Storify.

From what I can tell via a quick review of the history, Twitter, a year or so ago, came up with a media aggregation tool called Curator, which was compared to Storify. That's now being pushed commercially as Moments. Examples I've seen are more visually oriented than I remember Storify. If I've got it wrong, please correct me.

IMO, these sink or swim on the quality of the reportage and the visual storytelling... and it remains to be seen whether crowd-sourced material, or hastily assembled commercial curation (which is all I've seen so far), are going to be able to do what photojournalists and writers used to do regularly, and still manage to pull off occasionally when given the (financial) support they need.

I'm not excited by what I see in the tests shown in the Twitter blog. It's likely going to take not only a stronger push by Twitter management to get partners who are really committed, but also some marketers with enough creative vision to take advantage of the possibilities.

Missing, btw, is the kind of give and take I remember from Storify, where there was often a sense of drama and urgency at the core of the particular discussions that were turned into stories.

Also, to be noted, Twitter is going to need to take some proactive steps to dump Flash. It may be harder for them Twitter do do this than for more controlled environments... but right now if you've got Flash turned off... and more and more do... video doesn't work on Twitter at all.