Twitter opening up Moments for all to battle Snapchat, Instagram Stories

Twitter is following Snapchat and Instagram down the ‘Stories’ rabbit hole. Starting with “influencers, partners and brands,” Moments will eventually open up to every one of us.

Moments are Twitter’s way of creating immediacy as it relates to information. Currently limited to a curated feed (mostly) manicured by human editors, the core functionality will roll out to all users “in the coming months.”

Over the next few weeks, Twitter will be making Moments available to more companies and influencers it’s choosing to work with. Folks like civil rights activists DeRay Mckesson and VaynerMedia, to name a few.

This doesn’t mean the Moments feed on Twitter will change, though. Moments created by individuals or companies can be found via a dedicated button on their profile that links to Moments they’ve created.

Moments are also accessible via a tweet; click on the link in a tweet, and it takes you directly into a Moment.

Twitter is making Moments personal, too. You won’t have to adhere to Twitter’s curated topics for Moments; you can make whatever you want since it’s just the technology you’re taking advantage of (not the curation).

I bet Twitter folk are like ‘so, wait, if we open up Moments that’s just ‘stories’, right?’

LET’S DO IT.

— Nate Swanner (@NateSwanner) August 2, 2016

Moments are (and aren’t) Stories

Instagram and Snapchat have stories, which are literally the same thing. One snippet of text or media flows into the next, then it’s over.

Moments isn’t quite so hurried. You’re free to linger on a tweet or video, and scroll back through just as you would with your timeline.

Moments and Stories are the same in one way, though: you carry the narrative thread.

It should help make Twitter a bit more personal, but we have to wonder why Twitter didn’t simply roll this out to all of us immediately. Dogged by slow user growth, promising exciting features takes the air out of the sails a bit.

Snapchat primed us for Stories, and Instagram (which has already copied Moments, mind you) polished the feature off. Moments is likely the best of the three, but who wants to wait for it?