Twitter Moments
So the thing I blogged about last week launched yesterday. Twitter is calling it Moments.
New! Find the best of Twitter in an instant with Moments: https://t.co/QAKGUSVBbT pic.twitter.com/KAjfkysVKC
— Twitter (@twitter) October 6, 2015
I think this is a big deal for first time and casual users of Twitter. It’s an easier way to consume the content in Twitter for people who don’t have the time or inclination to customize Twitter to work for them the way many of us have.
Since the AVC community was fairly negative on this in concept, I’m wondering how all of you are thinking about it now that it is out. Let the conversation commence.
Comments (Archived):
Here’s Mickey Kaus’s reaction to it, which ties in with our discussion in the comments of your previous post on this:My 1st reaction to “Moments”: Another way for elite to censor & twist immigration news. Assume everyone thought that http://t.co/GBTvSoQVXe— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) October 7, 2015<script async=”” src=”//platform.twitter.com/widget…” charset=”utf-8″></script>
Highlight reel?
That sounds like a better idea. Let Twitter put together a nightly “Sports Center” program featuring news that broke through Twitter, viral videos that were tweeted, flame wars from politics, sports, etc. Host it on YouTube (or YouNow, or some other video platform), and use that to try to get new users to join (start using) Twitter.
Whose the target for this Fred?Let’s assume that everyone uses twitter, facebook, instagram and one of the three is the mainstay for their news or business community.Let’s also assume that attention like hours of the day is limited.Where does Moments pull the user from?
The target is advertisers. It creates some highly visible, highly valuable, real estate for people to buy their way into.I predict that Moments will eventually become the default twitter homepage for logged out users, who will eventually be encouraged to login to tailor their moments.It will be the new “aol front page”.
lovely
I liked it. Very curated and the #AllDayBreakfast content killed it. Nice to see something different.
we are in 2015 and a global service like Twitter states: “The Moments tab is currently only available in the United States.” #fail :/
Has to do with the chosen publishers or agreements with them probably. It is a sad reminder to what happens routinely to music or video, now artificially applied to content.
I know! But that is the point … US only 25% of active users (2013)
Just change your Twitter location to the US and pirate your moments illegally like I did.
I already did 😉 … was not so impressed either…
i agree but i think the reason is they want to see how it scales before pushing it to everyone. they could have picked another way to segment their user base, of course
well … testing on 65 million (number of monthly active U.S. Twitter users ) 😉
The danger is pushing established users away.Can’t stand the break up of the timeline based feed.
Ha! I don’t think they’re going to have much of a problem with it scaling. Scaling problems are for when you have repeat users ;<).
moments, highlights, whilst you’ve been away…the continued barstardization of the open, simple platform utility that made twitter groundbreaking and transformational.”I think entrepreneurs need to be careful not to curate too much because you lose the power of the peer network, open Internet model that has proven to be so potent and disruptive over the years.” – FW 7th Oct 2013 (2 years ago today!!)######Scratch that.#######moments, highlights, whilst you’ve been away…the continued curation and much-needed improvement of twitters signal to noise ratio and onboarding process”If you are building a marketplace or a social platform, make sure to build curation into your model. It will make the service easier for everyone to navigate, particularly new users.” – FW – 27th March 2011—–we’ve been here before. it’s the marketplace curation discussion by another name. no right or wrong answer. subtle shades. different strokes for different folks, based on position on adoption curve etc
Touche
Is this why you don’t want to publish a book?
It would be a great exploration of seeing how your own thoughts have evolved, and I’m sure if you tried to understand the nuances of each contradiction or variance that you’d come to learn a lot from it; that book would hold a lot of value.
Curation doesn’t have to mean strict rules. It can mean principles which are more flexible and broad.
yes, i like the conversation. books are not a conversational medium
One of the super annoying things about newspapers is that they haven’t left that “not a conversation” mindset.There are many news articles that I read that include an email address for the writer. And from time to time I have written to that email address and made a comment. And I have to tell you that the only way to ever get a reply is to essentially tell the writer that the story was great and how much you liked it. They always reply to those emails but if you leave that out and even if you give them helpful info you will never hear back. This is a finding that I exploited in the early days of the Internet to get free publicity. Blow smoke first, add helpful fact 2nd, so you become their next source of info and they quote you.
but they could be if published in the right format to the right platform.
Spent a lot of focus trying to change that… Wattpad has made a marketable step, Medium is getting there. Still far to go, but I believe there WILL be books/stories that look and act like conversations and are tremendously richer because of it.
Books are very frequently a conversational medium, it’s just that the pace of the conversation is glacial at best.You’re more a pamphlet man than a treatise man. Fair play to you.
LIAD, you remind me of my wife — she’s always reminding me of stuff I said 2 years ago too.
You know, “Curation” itself is such a meaningless word on its own, because it’s a means to an end, and not the objective. We need to ask what it accomplishes, what it enables, what the results are. Even saying “curated this” or “curated that” is not helpful. So, it can be a yes/no/grey answer because it depends.Good thing we don’t call museums “Curated empty halls”.
Yes – I find myself pathologically trapped in an overwhelmingly flooded nervous system, desperately struggling to curate/compress my holographic data-stream-overload into some meaningfully relevant/reusable world view frameworks.I’d like to think that twitter’s baby-steps curation move could evolve toward a collective analogue to the above.It just needs to steal a few purpose-driven, collectively-steered, extensible-functions from the now banished Google-Wave playbook potential.
I agree, but Twitter has a fundamental problem of low signal to noise ratio. This was baked in from the beginning due to the mechanics. This is just their attempt to raise the signal.
For Fred’s easier for everyone to navigate, particularly new users. sure, that’s a good goal.Then, for Fred’s I think entrepreneurs need to be careful not to curate too much because you lose the power of the peer network, open Internet model that has proven to be so potent and disruptive over the years with irony, let’s don’t “curate” and, thus, “lose the power of the peer network” and, instead, use “the power of the peer network” to “curate”, etc.
instead, use “the power of the peer network” to “curate”Hopefully, focused, purpose-driven, peer-network curation tools will follow ?
Yup.
2 years ago today!!In tech 2 years is like 20 years irl. No sense in telling Tom Watson he was wrong about the demand for computers as I am sure he changed his tune on that one.
Back of Envelope Analysisthe most valuable part of Twitter is its immediacy.Moments has nothing to do with immediacy.Thus, Moments is a mistake.Focus on tools that help with immediacy.
Is immediacy a stand alone functionis it a function at allor is it an attendant attributethat accelerates and amplifiesother purpose-driven functions ?
“Moments” is a misnomer. The content presumably will deliver immediacy, yet the name doesn’t reinforce the promise or deliverable.
BING-FRICKIN-GO.
This is something Twitter has been crying out for, glad it’s finally here. Perhaps the AVC community (and the wider tech community) may not find it highly useful, but it doesn’t interfere with their use of the remainder of the product. What is does provide, as you mention, is an easy way to experience Twitter for new users. It also provides the opportunity for ephemeral following – one could follow an event through a moment for a limited duration, without then having to constantly curate who they’re following with the events they want to see news on. Shame this is US only for now!
I didn’t know about that follow feature. So if you click on a Moment story, Twitter will automatically start populating your stream with related tweets? Or you have to manually select a follow request?
You follow a ‘Moment’. I used it for the MLB game last night, and it loaded my feed with a variety of related posts.
That’s interesting and innovative. That should have been the headline of their intro.
It will be really interesting to follow breaking news. Or something hyper local like following a game/concert/festival that you are at.
there is something there, definitely with that “instant follow” on a broad or specific topic. It’s like a “related bundle” follows you.
You need to choose to follow – but it’s only for live updating moments such as sports events or awards etc, so you can open moments without fear of subscribing to future tweets. The tweets then integrate into your usual timeline until the end of the moment. I’m sold.
Moments seems to very much be a product that makes Twitter useable to the mainstream, and less so for the power users. Do you see it becoming more difficult to adopt if there’s no widespread adoption of power users to begin with? (who presumably, already have all the curation they need)
Fred, this feature isn’t strategic in that it makes it harder to have an “Aha!” moment as to what Twitter is or what it can be used for. Additionally, even if new users were to derive value from Moments, it wouldn’t be a unique value proposition, Twitter will have to compete with others for it, e.g., Reddit, Facebook, etc., in addition to paying for it by becoming ambiguous and more complex.
Remind me, how does twitter make money?
Via ads/promoted tweets, though it could probably make more by charging power users a subscription fee (say, $1 per month for regular folks, and a lot more for Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton, Katy Perry, etc.).
Hmm not so sure why should they take someone who essentially creates content that your userbase consumes and charge them? Seems it should actually be the opposite. If Lady Gaga tweeting makes people go to twitter then you should pay Lady Gaga for making people happily use twitter.Would I pay Donald Trump to say shit on a website that I ran? Of course I would. It’s only a matter of how much I would pay for all of the traffic and attention he would bring to my nascent platform (hypothetical point).
Twitter tasked people with building something that they nor their friends would use so is it any wonder it’s such a mess? I’d love to have something that I could promote to my non-Twitter using friends so they could get a glimpse of the power that I see on a daily basis from a curated feed but this clearly is not it.You know who could figure it out for them? The very entrepreneurs that Twitter kicked off their platform. A large part of the value of Twitter was always created by its users and not by the staff of Twitter.
So true. Part of the Twitter magic was the “user as a member of the product team.” Got to regain that.
Seth’s comment on AVC the other day got me to thinking about my early days on Twitter. I wrote a post in response titled “I’m No Seth Godin. I Do Need Twitter.” In this post, I reminisced about how Twitter was such a vital part of my emergence during a time when I decided to reinvent my career… and in some ways my life. Not sure this would have happened without Twitter.Where I’m going with this is that I sometimes miss those early days of discovery on Twitter. For me Twitter was (and is) a marvelous thing. I miss those days of playing around on Twitter and figuring out how to make it work — figuring out who to follow, and how to engage, how to create a persona that was at the same time authentic. The recession created time for some of us to experiment. Not now. Too busy.I also discovered the world in a new way on Twitter. The world has never been the same for me since.Many of us on AVC can’t really understand or remember what it is like for someone approaching Twitter for the first time. We may not want or need a tour guide. But I think of the people in my life who are bewildered by Twitter. They don’t know where to start or how to latch on. The stream is moving too fast. I long for them to experience the discovery. I’m hoping that Moments will be that for some. I’m going to try it for a while. What I’d like is an email or an alert — just like I get from the NY Times. But it took me less than 60 seconds to peruse and I can see doing this at least once a day. I can see curious people who don’t quite “get” Twitter doing this. Why not?I think ONE editor or small team of editors is not quite the right approach. Somehow the “editing” or curating needs to come from something organic within Twitter. It probably has to come from the users in some way. This has always been the Twitter magic.I understand that Twitter has Wall Street to contend with and Wall Street has a way of squelching magic. But bringing back Jack was such a Twitter thing to do. Gives me hope.
I read your piece and enjoyed it Dona.My question–has Twitter lost its way or has it simply hit a wall and is trying to find a broader market?Hate to use the term but isn’t this an issue of niche size and business model and competition for mass market mindshare?
“My question–has Twitter lost its way or has it simply hit a wall and is trying to find a broader market?”I think the latter has forced the former.
a bad cycle with not good results invariably.
Yup…Twitter with the early crowd was awesome. Now, it’s overrun with marketers – same thing happens to pretty much every media play in social. Mass market means lots of people end up on it trying to use it for reasons early adopters don’t like.
It’s easy to be a critic.We don’t really know anything about what is going on or the real issues.So–easy have an answer.But at my gut, Twitter has true magic.And less is almost always more.Less is more http://awe.sm/bMp72
Agree, there is magic. I honestly love twitter. I use it all the time. But I know we techies/entrepreneurs are not the same as the mass market. Magic for us, is probably not magic for the masses.
depends what success means. if twitter has to become facebook in numbers then this discussion is academic.
It’s that, but it’s not JUST that. It was awesome with x users, but with 1000000000x users, not quite as much — for very many reasons. I think it’s VERY likely they realized this from the outset, but figured they’d cross the bridge in the unlikely event they got there. But here they (we) are.For every problem the platform has, ask yourself if facebook has that same problem. Largely, facebook has solved or mitigated the problems twitter faces (though if we looked under the hood at the solutions, I suspect we wouldn’t like them too much — but never mind that now).They know what their problems are (think of the beyond-colossal amount of data they possess), and likely have a range of solutions they could implement. Their challenge is this — how far can they go before they lose the simple magic that got them here.
In 2008 I built something called tradeshow tweets, the idea was to curate all the tweets coming from a tradeshow floor.It was a little early for the natural food expo crowd, but I still think the model has merit.Curate by proximity.
Yup a good concept.But the natural food world–among others-is locked and happy on Instagram. That is their network.
Food is visual.Ideas & links are not.
whose on instagramfoodhealthfitnessfashionyou are correct.and btw instagram for its purpose is about as perfect a product as i’ve every used.
100% agreement.Even better, their go to market was excellent – the focus on making your pics better……
Fwiw I started watching a CNN special the other night makes a big deal about 13 year olds and Instagram and twitter. You might find it interesting. I am only 10 minutes in (wife fell a sleep and I like to say “it’s no fun by your self”)http://www.cnn.com/specials…
sure i’ll look at it. thanks
When I was a kid my dad would say “you have to develop a taste for olives” meaning it wasn’t something that a person would typically like off the bat.,And as you know even if everyone tastes olives, not all of them will stick around long enough to “develop a taste for olives”. [1] Some will actually be turned off and not even try it ever again.Well let’s just stipulate that olives (and twitter) is not frosted cake or ice cream, right? Nobody needs an arm twisting to like either of those. It’s immediate desire.Broader market? Not with the current product. After all just about everyone knows about twitter (and olives or lobster) it’s constantly being mentioned (Nightly News, many if not all network news shows) Twitter has Trump sized publicity going for it. And all of that publicity and they still can’t cross the wall. Long ago they have exploited the low hanging fruit of opportunity.Twitter is a complex product visually. It’s the opposite of a well laid out and tweaked Nytimes.com home page or a seductive advertisement. Only certain types of brains are drawn to that and find it immediately appealing.[1] Or lobster or crab. God knows my wife will not eat lobster or crab she simply doesn’t like it. It’s not frosted cake or chocolate and it doesn’t hit the pleasure centers the same way.
Nicely articulated but I don’t this is as relevant as it was back when.How many people drink cold pressed juices in NA? About $24B dollars worth a year and growing at 4-9%.How many 10 years ago?Twitter in my opinion is not understanding that its core value is undeniably useful and addictive to a much broader group of people. They are simply loosing their center when what they should do is focus on it.
Bing-frickin-go.Does Jack read AVC?The answers are all here.
“Twitter in my opinion is not understanding that its core value is undeniably useful and addictive to a much broader group of people.”Spot on, Arnold.However, non-users may not have experimented w/ TWTR cause they’re not particularly smitten w/ celebrities, athletes, thought-leaders, etc. Topical news driven by “Moments” may be the hook that stimulates trial among non-users. Once indoctrinated they too may see value and succumb to the platform’s addictive behavior. It’s a promo tool to drive trial, not a brand re-invention.
Thanks.Twitter is not going to be Facebook in size or model.The more it focuses on what makes it unique and the more, for the first time, markets to the users, it has a real shot.It can only win by being innovative not derivative to the other models.So I think and so i really am pulling for them.The world with Twitter in it is a more interesting place.
It is for sure. Is there a mainstream consumer market for real-time news? CNN was never mainstream…
BINGO. No, there’s not…and I’m glad. There is no need (in the vast majority of cases) for real-time news to help people find out what’s going on 24/7, all over the world. 99.9% is un-actionable / irrelevant to some person sitting in “anytown usa”.
Along these lines, if I may, I expanded on my thoughts a bit more “Is Twitter the new Yahoo?” https://medium.com/@bdesarn…
Read your medium post. Valid questions, although it’s all in the execution. To postulate that TWTR may become the next Yahoo suggests the company is abandoning core brand equities, which I don’t believe they’re remotely interested in doing. They’re not looking to alienate core users, rather w/ “Moments” (terrible name) they’re looking to stimulate usage among light and non-users. I believe they’re pursuing a classic market segmentation scheme by parsing light, medium and heavy users and deploying diff strat to drive usage/engagement for each segment. The bottom line is their current biz model is not generating enough growth, part by WS standards (a curse when one goes public and no longer has spin control).
You’re saying I think more eloquently what I tried to say. Moment type could be OK experiment outside of core twitter. core twitter has to accept that has to be sub-segment of total market vs larger/broader platforms like facebook
Real-time, shoot out to the world, immediacy is a powerful feature of Twitter but is that ultimately its only core function ?Peer filtering of key topics/ideas seems just as pivotal to its long term value for me.Evolving more collaborative-distillation tools for shared topics/ideas feels more like its under tapped function ?
Simple marketing question? WHY?Twitter has a job. Let me follow people I find interesting.Why else would I use it?They need to deepen the bond between audience & PoI. They show no interest in doing so.They should have hired someone from WeChat instead of Jack.
I tend to visualize Twitter as the flip side of Facebook.Facebook is about connecting with people/relationships.whereTwitter is about connecting with ideas/topicsSure you follow people on Twitter but largely as vectors into shared ideas/topics.Amplifying all the basic functions attendant around ideas/topics into their larger peer-collaborative analogue seem like a natural evolution for Twitter ?
I think Twitter is about connecting to people.
So you follow the same people on Twitter as Facebook ?All connections revolve around people but the selection-filter criteria vary by purpose/need.
Agree, its type of relationship:- friends or old friends on FB- colleagues or former colleagues on Li- people I find interesting because of their position or interests is TwitYou are 100% correct that Twitter is the most topical of all, but its people who are closely associated to a topic. The topic comes second.
Yes there are no ideas or topics without people.That is where ideas/topics exist.Still we follow people on Twitter because we deem their hold on an idea or topic to be valuable to us not because we just like/know their persona?
I actually just had a brief Twitter convo around a topic/idea after tweeting about today’s AVC post –with a guy I met here years ago. Went from idea/topic to personal at the end.Twitter is about connecting to people for people who are about connecting to people.
Thanks, A.A question for the brilliant marketing brains like yours.I can’t help but think that Twitter’s answers lie somewhere within the network that essentially created it. They need to tap that.Also, Twitter has the potential to be a collection of things rather than one big thing. Just can’t be everything (singular) to everyone, but is a great platform to be a lot of different things (plural) for different markets/segments.Do they have category managers or GMs of verticals I wonder? What if they thought of themselves the way marketplace companies think. If they don’t already.But what do I know? Really.
The more you focus on your core the better you-usually– are.I think Twitter could be/will be huge.They need to be better at understanding their market.
So true.
Great thoughts here Donna. You don’t get the daily email from Twitter, What’s popular in your network?
You were looking for content to curate, most people aren’t in that 10%; along with the 1% that create and 100% that consume.
It’s not available yet in Canada, so I’m imagining what it is, based on reading and seeing screenshots. It seems to be underwhelming at the first impression, and why such a limited number of publishers initially? If think TechCrunch nails it, asking 9 Unanswered questions about Moments, techcrunch.com/2015/10/06/l…
And I’m not seeing it on my phone which is where I’d be likely to use it.
Ah, so only on the web version in the US?
Or maybe selective mobile accounts at the beginning? The blog made it seem like it would be on my phone. Funny thing is that there is now a space on the menu that looks as though something is supposed to be there. Placeholder?
Change your location to US, its instantly becomes accessible.
I just did with Hola on desktop, and saw it. Hmmm, I like it even less. Here’s a comparison to my GoogleNews. Now Twitter is showing older news than GoogleNews because curators are in the way 🙂
Yeah but did you see all those great vines about waking up in the morning and dunkin donuts? GoogleNews won’t show you that I bet. /s
I would welcome more UGC into the mix.
I’m having a hard moment understanding Moments. So, is it Best of Twitter, or best of BuzzFeed, Fox News, Mashable, MLB, NASA, the New York Times, Vogue and the Washington Post?
I wouldn’t be surprised if a companies ‘promoted tweet’ budget was a factor in its moment-worthiness.
I wouldn’t either. My gut is that is largely part of every ad model in existence. If you spend money, you’re obviously more likely to get more exposure.
Remember the feeling of wanting to read the WSJ at the airport but you could only find USA today, Twitter moments is the USA today of curation
Moments is a “big deal”. Who gets up in the morning and says: “I want to consume random news moments?” Before I do anything else today, I have to check my FB feed…
Meh. I can’t share the moments??? Social Media and I can’t share? I can’t click to the actual story?
you can share moments
Ui is horrible. I’ve used twitter from day one (mostly with hootsuite) and it took me a while to figure out. I’m on a note 5. Android using Twitter native app.
My first thought on checking out Moments was it looks like the home page of Google News. My second though was how long until they are selling off the top spots on Moments, if they aren’t already.
Would Jack Dorsey have approved Moments?
seems like he timed his announcement with the launch. that tells me something
so both have been in the works for some time? synchronisation as a marketing strategy.
He’s been interim CEO for about as long as I would plan on dev of this feature to take. The announcement of his being made permanent and the US launch of the feature are essentially simultaneous.I’m pretty sure he not only approves of it, he was involved in its execution.
top of funnel stuff. not interesting.
Not impressed with moments. Agree with William Mougayar it is still hard to understand and should not curate for the sake of curation. I still use Twitter for one thing to tweet and retweet, basically what was the original meaning of Twitter. Btw as much as I respect Jack Dorsey, don’t think he will move the needle and 6-9 months out he will need to decide Twitter or Square, we all have 24 hours per day. Wall Street punishes part time CEOs re: Square IPO.
I found it to be a better version of Snapchat Discover. The MLB game into my feed was nice, and the recap was even better. An Andreesen Twitterstorm captured in Moment-form would would be a great way to consume it.
I have no real opinion on the technology… but as a marketing dude, I hate the word “moments” when ever it’s used. It’s just one of those schmaltzy non-words.
Similarly Reddit just released Upvoted.com as their curated platform. They’ll basically be taking content – that they legally have the right to use based on TOS – like Buzzfeed would do and compile, into something more structured.
Wow, I hadn’t noticed that. To be fair, the formatting of reddit proper is usually a clusterfuck and requires its own skill to even read. So they are basically reformatting these stories into something normals can consume, which isn’t such a bad idea.
Upvoted is definitely a step forward for reddit. It’s interesting that the idea came from a community member (and reddit thanks them in the credits).Let’s see if they’re treating it as an experiment or as a legit new medium.
Good looking feature, well executed from a product perspective but not for me as a user.For those of us who’ve used Twitter a while and created our own curated feeds I question the value add of centralized curation, especially since this first pass seemed to surface an overwhelming number of topics which, while timely, were of little to no interest to me (e.g. baseball). On the other hand I like the idea of having a pulse of what’s relevant now — which is what Moments could become. I imagine it’s a good starting point for new users who may prefer to consume information and use Twitter as a source of news rather than a communication/broadcast platform.
Still using Tweetbot. Until there is a developer API and the Tweetbot people add it in this doesn’t exist in my world. I don’t feel like I’m missing much though.
At least they are trying to do something to encourage user growth. I rather like the concept but it certainly needs some evolution to become really valuable. It doesn’t take away from the fundamentals of Twitter but gives users some view into what is generally happening. Like all new approaches, it needs time to evolve as the user community plays with it.
You remember the old #Discover tab? This is pretty close to it, and maybe a 5% improvement.
I MUCH preferred the Discover tab. There was a sense of rational spontaneity – it used my existing first-order linkages to find new and interesting people to follow and tweets to read. It was great for both new users (who might not be following many people) as well as longtime users.This new feature just seems like, “here’s what’s going on in the news”. Is that really so appealing to new users? Like…what’s the draw? These users already have this kind of feature on Facebook, a service they are much more familiar with.
i agree with you, more than you agree with yourself 🙂
The AVC didn’t seem to be negative about the curation concept. The discussion was around the implementation: Twitter should not be the one doing the curation, the power users should.
I think they are essentially “forcing a market”, but I think calling it a niche is off. They are at $2 billion in revenue and $18 B in market cap (which may decline more). Twitter is part of a broader trend I see mainly with public companies (but big startups now too). Enough is never enough. Twitter is great for what it does, and probably a $5B-$15B company. Which is INSANELY successful. Like literally a 1 in 10,000 company, maybe 1 in 100,000. But when compared to Facebook ($250B market cap), Google ($450B market cap), Apple ($650B) is very small. I also think this “comparative smallness” is one reason the unicorn phenomenon is so out of control (obviously big VC funds, cheap interest rates, hype cycle, non-VC late stage investors etc also contribute). This is honestly one of the shitty things about capitalism that enough is never enough. When I worked at Deloitte every major client that brought us in for consulting work wanted to grow say 10% – 20% EPS per year. In an economy of 2% long term growth and below 2% inflation, and already very debt laden, everything can’t grow at double or triple that pace. That is part of the destructive nature of our current business capitalism. Again, capitalism and broadly free markets are by far the best system the world has created, but this “constant need to grow as much as possible” is a major trend that I don’t see discussed or acknowledged enough.
Power, in general, not just capitalism, has the “enough is never enough” problem.A large part of that, I think, is that you simply don’t hear as much about the people who do get “enough” money (or power, or fame, or…); small ambitions don’t make the news when they’re sated, and large ambitions tend to be “more about the journey than the destination” – or at the very least, involving a lot more habituating to the journey along the way.
Twitter is better with more people on Twitter. The problem with Twitter has always been that my 65 year old mother is not on Twitter but she is on Facebook. Why is that? For the same reason it took me a few years to really start to use Twitter, it starts off looking like a crappy stream of consciousness and horrible brand content. Moment’s will allow new users to get a small taste of the power of Twitter right off the bat, and then ease them into proper usage. Moments will have no affect on the hardcore OG Twitterati, but it will create a stronger network.
“The problem with Twitter has always been that my 65 year old mother is not on Twitter but she is on Facebook. Why is that?”Because her family and friends – aka the people she cares about – are on FB. Many people don’t care about current events, business intelligence, etc the way those who use Twitter do.
Everyone cares about family and friends but most everyone also has some passions for specific topics or ideas they hold dear.Quality curation around those topics and ideas could create an easy entry point for new users to build follow-connections or just as a general discovery mechanism for their favourite topics and ideas.Around “topics and ideas” real-time immediacy is very catalytic to collective brain-storming but not and end in-and-of itself.Real-time immediacy is a core feature but not the only core function on which Twitter can expand its reach.
Sharing both inside twitter and outside is very hard. No link to native android sharing. Ui difficult to navigate.
I think the AVC community views TWTR from the lens of fhe converted. From the comments it appears many are already drinking TWTR’s Kool-aid and the platform is fundamentally satiating their needs. Moments (a terrible name, btw) isn’t really for you. It’s targeting light users and non-users as an introductory, engagement tool. Nothing wrong w/ that, seems smart frankly, although it’s a parity attribute to FB, Reddit news feeds.
i agree with your observation about this community
Actually add GoogleNews to that mix, as it’s more mainstream. Reddit is nerdy. But even then, what Twitter needs to also improve on, is their on-boarding experience. Moments is useful once you are there, but how do you get there? People are risk-averse in changing their habits for small gains.
Moments (a terrible name, btw)Agree. Very bush league. No edginess at all. Sounds old and tired like some Saturday night activity at a retirement home. Or perhaps the name of a 55 plus community “Moments at Sandybrook Farm Townhouses”.
“Moments” sounds like a tagline for Hallmark cards or a cheesy 70’s era Polaroid campaign.
Often I deal with startups and naming. This type of stuff happens quite frequently. They get “married” to a particular idea or word and then ask friends and family “what do you think” and go from there and brand in a way that can’t be reversed. And they simply won’t consider any other name (which is why they end up paying to much for what they need to buy). Obviously I don’t know the process twitter used [1] but to me it doesn’t pass the smell test.[1] For all we know they hired namelab and that’s what they came up with for them after charging several hundred thousand dollars.
Oh man.. I was enjoying the thread in lurker mode so much until your “55 plus” remark. But well, you are right, maybe Moments don’t capture the intended function group functionality within Twitter, because that is what it is for me, not a product name.An edgy, meaningless and stupid name might be suitable to attract people in the 55 minus age group *grin*, but then again I am not a naming expert. My brief experience naming things indicates that all names are taken, even the stupid ones in my head.Haven’t you heard? 55 is the new 45!(slams the door walking out of the bar)
Come on back into the bar long enough to read this:http://www.nytimes.com/2006…(Can’t resist the irony given your comment and your name…)Fwiw I do a great deal with naming and I am kind of near said age group.
I did know about him and about his death, just because we shared names, not related though. Sad he did not make it to the 55+ ole gals and boys club.It is interesting that you work with names, I would like to run smell tests on a few soon and don’t know if there is a proper way of doing that.A name is a name is a name.
I think Twitter can do better than this. C’mon Jack. Show us your leadership and insights. You wanted to be like Elon Musk, heading-up 2 companies. Now you have the 2 companies. Show us you are super-human like Elon is, and Steve Jobs was.The worst part of this much hyped intro is that it gets introduced by a junior product manager on their blog, and with trivial instructions on how to use it. I dropped my jaw reading it. Was almost expecting them to then say “Hold your smartphone in the palm of your hand, and use your finger to touch it and swipe; or Hold your mouse with your thumb and index resting on it, and move it around and click on the bolt icon if you are in the USA…”From: https://blog.twitter.com/20…”When you click into a Moment, you’re taken to an introduction with a title and description.Start swiping to dive right into the story, with immersive full-bleed images and autoplaying videos, Vines, and GIFs.A single tap gives you a fuller view of the Tweet, which you can favorite, Retweet, and more. A double tap lets you instantly favorite the Tweet.The progress bar at the bottom indicates how much more each Moment has to offer.Swiping up or down dismisses the Moment and takes you back to the guide.At the end of a Moment, click the share button to Tweet your thoughts, and send it out to your followers.”
Copying Snapchat & other messaging apps.My sense is your long distance assessment of Jack’s desires is 100% correct.We’ll see if he is a visionary, I guess.
I don’t appreciate more curation of my already curated consumption. While, I’ve only used it more a day, it feels forced. For me it’s more about losing out of the serendipitous finds that happen from exploring other people’s tweets.
That’s pretty cool. Reminds me a bit of “Editors Picks” on mobile google news which I use almost every day (<— Important). I am also noting that it shows up on an unlogged in twitter page but not on a logged in twitter page (it’s under a “moments” tab).My question is how would anyone who isn’t currently engaged in twitter, or has tried it and thinks they know what twitter is, know that it now has this feature? I wouldn’t, if you hadn’t mentioned it. What’s the PR outreach or marketing that will be behind the rollout?
Exactly. This is such a geeky intro, it’s not even funny. https://support.twitter.com…They should have positioned it as something more than just curated news. It’s a new entry page, it’s a way to follow news (that’s innovative because Twitter will populate more related content on stuff you read). Where is the campaign to drive new users to go there? They have no marketing manager that gets this.
They have no marketing manager that gets this.Because those in charge don’t live and breath marketing and business. Different mindset.Yeah it’s scary. This is part of the entire mindset of tech. It’s more or less a “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door”. Essentially word of mouth or viral spread with little need for traditional marketing and outreach. Plus the entire “either it’s a hero or a zero” with no in between states. Kind of fits the entire “utility” mindset actually.I noticed the mindset when I got into tech in the 90’s vs. the 80’s when I was in a traditional business and had to fight for each and every order and do advertising, marketing, sales and so on. (Then actually get the work done) Or the things I did in high school and college were the same. In tech you just essentially stuck your hand out and grabbed business … like shooting fish in a barrel. Traditional marketing wasn’t needed anywhere near as much.And yes, you are right, this is a separate product not an improvement or addition to the regular product. Marketing it as a separate product they could have taken advantage of a new PR blitz and viral pass along.
Actually I don’t see Moments in the unlogged experience. Nothing there. It still prompts you to signup, but I agree it should be there, and then entice you to register.
This is how you introduce a new product, like Ev did with Medium today. Seems like Jack could learn from Ev. https://medium.com/the-stor…
MehRight now I’m looking at moments and I see one about the Astros beating the Yankees. Now I don’t really care about baseball, but I think this could be interesting if it were opening night of the NY Rangers series (tonight in Chicago)In other words, if I could curate my own moments based on my own interests 9or have the system auto curate based on the things I am interested in) then that would be a hell of a service.But having editors at Twitter curate what they think should be interesting to me – not so much. I already get that from the NY Times, The wall Street Journal, the NY POst and the FInancial Times every day – not to mention blogs, magazines etc….
I like Moments because it adds great value to those not willing to invest the time to set up their own Twitter system/curation, which makes Twitter more valuable to a whole much larger swath of people, while it takes nothing away from die-hard users, which may not use Moments much.I wish many people could better get beyond their own mindset of what is best only for them as a user, and think of the service as a whole, and that a more valuable service has more resources to, in the long run, assist all of its users.
http://www.theguardian.com/…i wonder if he’s a reformer hoping to harness the democratic power of twitter for change?i wonder what highlights might be allowed to appear in a curated Moments for Saudi citizens?
Is Twitter the new Yahoo? I personally find “Moments” meh at best. The biggest positive to keep a bit of faith in the company is that Twitter seems to be finally moving again from a product standpoint and experimentation is great.In my opinion, they would have greater potential success following the Facebook model of app constellation. I can see how a dedicated Moment type app built off Twitter core users created content could be another buzzfeed/flipboard type media mainstream product.For me, Twitter core essence is its real-time model. And that is not a mainstream consumer need outside of mega important breaking news and other catastrophic events. For the rest of the time, Twitter has become the echochamber of the influencers and the native early power users. The proof to me is how hard it is to create meaningful two-way interactions and engagement. Try to create a new Twitter account from scratch and without either tons of patience or borderline “gaming”, it’s near impossible to create engagement. Yes it is super valuable once you’ve have patiently created your follow list to get a pulse on the news of interest but getting there by being simply a lurker is not what the platform core is about.So to go back to my opening ? – it feels that the most excited people about Moments are the native Twitter power users who have built for themselves over time genuine influence and have a fear of Twitter continuing to shrink in overall influence vs other platforms. When you see the traction Robert Scoble has on Facebook and look at progress by Medium and other LinkedIn on the other side, yes indeed – you can wonder if Twitter move is not too late? aka is Twitter the new Yahoo of our times?
Your opening and closing lines are harsh (not saying you are wrong, but the idea that the two are comparable should be unbearable for people who love Twitter).
James – I can see your point. Now I personally find that too many Twitter “influencers” (the core Twitter users) are way over-analysing and really trying too hard to pump up the beast. I have yet/still waiting to see someone who is a power/influencer there – agree to experiment starting a new account from scratch and see how he feels after weeks of nobody paying attention to him/her.
I actually see a lot of similarities between post peak YHOO (~2000-2002) and current day twitter.Way too many people believing their own press clippings.
I am grateful I don’t have to interact, ever, with Moments. Gave me the same reaction as when I erroneously end up on the Yahoo HP – total mishmash. #underwhelmed
I think it looks great, but seems bolted on to the main Twitter experience.I could see Moments taking over the main Twitter experience. Moments would then (as now) be powered by separate apps/experiences… a Tweet app (good old Twitter timeline and tweet creator), Periscope, Vine, whatever comes next.Moments is the consuming app/experience, Tweets/Periscope/Vine are the content generators. (While still maintaining their separate characteristics… timeline, revine, etc.)
It’s a fine product.It could be the core of a solid $2-3 billion company. That is quite an achievement.Is it going to transform a $17B company into a $50B company? I don’t think so. To me Twitter’s problem has always been its valuation is out of whack.
Casual user of Twitter here. I like Moments but I don’t love it mainly because there’s a lot of cruft around it i.e. Twitter itself. I like the idea of a “best of” page. Like the front page of Reddit, Buzzfeed, the Explore tab on Instagram (since replaced by Search tab), and the new http://www.upvoted.com page for Reddit. I want to see the best trending topics/discussions.Moments should be a separate app where content consumption, not interaction, is the primary experience.
Moments is a start… small start, right direction. But curation needs to be peer-to-peer. If Twitter tries to do all, most or even the most important curation, that is a very new, different and difficult business for them, and may disenfranchise their core base.
It hits the mark set by Fred’s thoughtful & careful description, “for first time and casual users…” and “easier way to…” The measurements will eventually tell us whether or not it’s a big deal for those users. My experience tells me it’s not. I’m not sure what Twitter’s user testing indicated.I love Twitter. It’s a broadcasting platform, though, that its products must (and have yet to) embrace & exploit. I’m with Rich Weisberger, to repurpose a slogan, “It’s the immediacy, stupid.”It’s now-ness. I want to be part of stuff that interests me, that’s relevant to me…but it must be happening now: conversations, periscopes, sports highlights, breaking news, etc. Help me discover those so that I can see & participate…now.
A more detailed look at Moments that inspired me to give it a 2nd look, https://stratechery.com/201….
The immediate problem I see with Twitter Moments is that it totally lacks customization. As an Indian in the US, I want to see ‘moments’ from both India and the US. But right now, I can’t do that. The problem with curation is that the number of editors you need will always increase. To decrease that cost, Twitter will soon rely either on algorithms (which will never be accurate and will destroy the product) or will depend on me to tell it what my interests are (which is a painful, inaccurate process which is used by literally every other app in the world which wants to show me curated content. On a related note, I don’t use any of those apps anymore).Neither of the above is an appealing solution. So either twitter will move to a fully curation model, spending millions on curation, or will kill Moments soon. Let’s see what wins – time or money.
My marketing background informs my following comment: I don’t think that Moments is really about curating the best on Twitter and making people understand how lovely everything on Twitter is. I think it’s about creating FOMO for people who don’t use Twitter enough, to somehow encourage them to populate the system to fulfil the desire to be recognised in moments, or, to experience that sense of zeitgeist that comes from indulging in the consumption of moments. It’s a good marketing feature that is meta in that sense. Not a negative or a positive, but let’s hope it drives new users to the platform.
Fred, do you think its more important for twitter to appeal to new/more users (which Moments clearly is focused on) or do a better job of serving (and ostensibly monetizing) the existing user base? And, do you think they can do pursue a strategy of doing both things?
” free market loving venture capitalist” and Jimmy Baker was a Christian.
Personally, if I were twitter I would fix their mobile app. It’s terrible. It’s very telling that the most popular mobile twitter apps are 3rd party developed. Twitter needs to prioritize making a solid widget that sits on your home screen and that you can scroll through. Also a twitter app that supports multiple accounts more seamlessly.They should just acquire Falcon, who makes the best twitter app / widget and rebrand.
channels would be good, by topic; auto curated by hashtag. that would be easy. with a “homepage” and your own top 10 tags. what are you interested in? enter a #word … #space #mars #food #tech #dogs #cats #fashion #anime … boom, homepage appears, with channels, and tools to adjust. never more than 10actually, facebook should do this too.