Twitter’s new feature called Project Lightning is about to change the way people see and use Twitter by making people interact more through twitter’s collection of curated tweets, photos, videos, Vines and Periscope videos. “It could be current events. It could be breaking news. It could be awards shows or sports. But also cultural events and moments,” said Kevin Weil, Vice President of Product for Revenue at Twitter. “It’s a brand-new way to look at tweets. This is a bold change, not evolutionary,” Weil added.
The new feature Twitter is developing, which will make it easier for all twitter users to follow live events happening near them will allow users to find any event that people tweet about. Furthermore, even people that do not use Twitter and don’t have a Twitter account will be able to follow the events from other apps all over the web. This way Twitter will be able to reach a wide number of people and attract more visitors.
“These collections are designed to take advantage of images and videos associated with a particular event, and to bring them to life. [...] None of that media is presented in the standard Twitter timeline – each tweet, picture, or video will take up the entire screen of your phone. You’ll view them one at a time by swiping. Importantly, collections will include – and thus promote – not only pictures and videos posted to Twitter, but Vines and Periscope videos as well,” according to Buzzfeed’s Mat Honan.
Twitter’s mobile app will feature a new button that when pressed will take its users to a window that shows several events that are pre-scheduled or current evens/ breaking news people are tweeting about. “There’s a beautiful connection to our strategy of reaching users on every platform. It’s not just logged-in Twitter, it’s logged-out, and it’s syndicated on other websites and mobile apps. This reaches all of them. The collections are a core part of our logged-in experience — that’s the point of being in the center tab. But you can easily imagine them as logged-out experiences telling about something happening now out in the world. And you can imagine them — and this is new — as collections and syndicating them across any website or mobile app,” Weil said.
According to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, the new feature Project Lightning has already been in the work for months. “I have no doubt that when it launches people will create a narrative that it was the result of something critical. People think I read something and then two months later we launched something — but that’s not the way this works. This has been in the works for months and months,” Costolo explained.
(Picture source: bgr.in)