Moments: The Newsfeed you Probably Won’t Look At
Puzzle’s take on the Twitters latest venture… ‘Moments’.
This week Twitter’s latest product ‘Moments’ launched in the UK, quite literally almost, thanks to Tim Peake launching for the International Space Station in almost perfect unison.
Yet it appears that Moments is another play to try and provide tangible revenue and reduce the ever-increasing pressure that the company is getting from investors. This latest offering attempts to position Twitter as a leader in the news game, extract more ad spend from brands and away from the likes of Facebook.
In case you haven’t used it yet let me quickly explain how Moments operates. It can be accessed via Twitter native apps by simply clicking on a Lightning Bolt icon that has been unceremoniously dumped into the middle of its persistent navigation (now bringing them up to five awkwardly placed icons). Once that opens up you see a collection of various news stories, videos, gifs and Vines. All of these, curated by a team of editors that seemingly have no understanding of my likes or dislikes.
I should say now that I love Twitter, it is where I get most of my news from; happy or sad. This is the platform that alerted me to the atrocities in Paris, the weird name of Kim and Kanye’s latest baby and the wonderful news that Tim Sherwood had finally been sacked from my beloved Aston Villa in October this year.
Moments is clearly intended to let me find out important things that are breaking. Yet, I (and many others) have spent years curating my own feeds so that it is personalised to me. Today when I look at Moments I’m displayed a Star Wars story (I hate Star Wars) something on Donald Trump and a story relating to someone called Nanny Pat (from TOWIE I believe) who has sadly died
My point being that none of this is personal to me, I’m being force-fed irrelevant content and given the fact that Twitter already has a comprehensive view of who I follow and engage with on its platform, this random approach is unacceptable.
We all know that Apple recently launched its updated Music offering but also News in iOS9. Both of which affords its users the opportunity to define personal interests so that Apple could begin to understand me and my likes/dislikes. This in turn, means that Apple has a starting position to serve me content that is relevant to me and can begin to automate that process over time.
Twitter had a huge opportunity to do something quite spectacular in this space and it has #failed. Seemingly everyone is trying to ‘own’ my newsfeed right now… but this is yet another one that I’ll never visit.