It was supposed to rival Facebook’s trending news. Now it’s getting replaced.
Twitter Moments, which last year was touted as the solution to Twitter’s problems with reaching a wider audience, has now become another item on Twitter’s list of struggling projects. Recently, the social network has been exploring options to modify or replace Moments, first with a “Happening” option and now with an “Explore” option.
This wouldn’t be the first time Twitter has tweaked Moments since its launch. In August, Twitter announced that all Twitter users and not just its partners — groups like the MLB, NASA, and Buzzfeed — could make their own “moments.” The concept is great, and Twitter has actually made Moments as useful and intuitive as it advertises it to be.
So why then does Moments (and Twitter as whole) struggle? In many ways, it is because the service is redundant. Social media users already have services like Snapchat and Instagram to catalog their individual life stories. And when it comes to organizing public events or reaching large audiences in a meaningful way, Facebook pretty much has the market cornered.
Twitter has tried to do all of these things, but with little success. The social network still gets the greatest traction when it acts as an up-to-the-second news source, as it did in the beginning.
As Moments fails to capture Twitter’s audience’s attention, maybe it is time for the company to go back to its roots.