Gadgetory

so for years the knock on Twitter has been that it's too hard to use average people would pick up the app and they wouldn't know who to follow or what a favorite was or what a retweet was and this year that actually became a big problem Twitter's user growth plateaued the stock price plummeted and Twitter had to figure out what its next step was and what they decided to do was to try to build a version of Twitter inside the main app that would be easy enough for anyone to use they're calling it moments and it rolls out today so this is moments it's a new tab inside the Twitter app tap it and you see a list of the day's top stories they've been put together by a team of Twitter engineers in New York along with media partners that Twitter worked with like Entertainment Weekly vogue Major League Baseball and moments is comprised of moments what's a moment well it's basically just a collection of tweets and when you tap on one it opens up and you'll see eight nine ten twelve fifteen tweets that are a wide mix of things they can be text only but most of the tweets you're gonna see in here are visual you'll see photos you'll see videos uploaded a Twitter you'll see vines and Twitter's try to build these moments so that they all feel like they have a beginning middle and an end you swipe through them with your thumb and you see a kind of thumbnail sketch of that story if there's anything you want to know more about you can just tap on the the image or tap on the text and you have options you can favorite it you can retweet it or tap this little ellipses button and you can perform a whole host of other actions like if you see a really great tweet you can follow the person who tweeted it or you can share it with a friend by sending it as a direct message so Moments has multiple sections it might remind you of a newspaper it opens up in a section called today which is a basic mix of the day's top stories there's also a news tab for kind of straight hard news but then you'll also find sports entertainment and a category called fun that includes all sorts of weird things like here's the world beard and mustache champion chips and the idea is that you'll be able to see all of these things even if you've never followed a single person on Twitter even if you have no idea what Twitter really is they're also building it so that it will highlight interesting conversations on Twitter so if two celebrities start going back and forth you'll see everything they had to say you'll see one more interesting thing in moments and that's a follow button sometimes when there's a big event going on like the Super Bowl or the Oscars you can see a follow button next to it inside moments and if you tap it it'll actually bring tweets from that event into your home timeline so if you're browsing Twitter during that event you'll see all the best tweets from the Oscars from the Super Bowl showing up alongside the tweets of those people who you do already follow so if you're a power user of Twitter this is the part of moments that you'll probably find the most interesting the idea is that all those great like jokes and pieces of commentary that you were missing before because you didn't know where to look Twitter's finding them using signals like favorites and retweets and just showing them to you because it knows that you're interested in the event and when the events over those accounts that you were seeing in your timeline they just all disappear and you get back to your home time line so will moments bring a billion people to Twitter it's hard to say if you're a power user of Twitter moments literally was not built for you the real question is how you'll feel about it if you've never used twitter before and now that it's available we're about to find out the answer