What You Need To Know About Twitter’s Latest Change

Jack Dorsey sure was quick with making good on his promises as the new CEO of Twitter. Starting today, the Twitter iOS and Android apps feature a new tab, called Moments, to help you follow trending stories as they unfold on the 140-character social network. Moments adds a fifth tab to the bottom of your app screen: a lightning bolt-shaped icon in between Notifications and Messages. There, Moments gathers the biggest stories taking place on Twitter, organized into categories such as Sports, News, Today, and Entertainment. The content inside (tweets, photos, Vines, and stories from NASA, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among others) is hand-curated by a team at Twitter and updated throughout the day. The idea is that you're not just seeing tweets about a topic, but a full story arc around that topic as it happens. You can browse this stream of tweets within the Moments tab, or you can follow a particular Moment. When you follow a Moment, all tweets pertaining to that topic get inserted into your timeline, so you can read the best tweets about a topic without actually having to follow anyone different. When the Moment is done (say, it’s the season premiere of Game of Thrones and the show concludes), your Twitter feed goes back to normal. This does two things for Twitter and its users: It capitalizes on the real-time zeitgeist around live and trending events, and it helps get users more engaged during those events (keep on faving and retweeting, y’all!). Both of these could help Twitter make more money, which it desperately needs to do in order to garner faith from investors — and, you know, exist as a successful company. Hopefully Moments will succeed where the Discover tab never really did.