The conversation we had on this blog a couple weeks ago about Twitter becoming a journalistic entity by hiring editors to curate Tweets and create what is now known as Moments was interesting. But it missed something important about Moments that I did not realize at the time. Moments will be a platform for anyone to curate Tweets and publish them as Moments. I figured this out yesterday in this tweet conversation with Madhu who is Twitter’s product manager for Moments.
@fredwilson as per our policies we don’t cover ourselves: https://t.co/ZIDqyOrJn3 — sorry!
— Madhu ⚡ (@justmadhu) October 21, 2015
@justmadhu i guess that makes sense. but i bet your users want to you to. at least i do.
— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) October 21, 2015
@justmadhu awesome. sounds like a great way to solve that problem. — Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) October 21, 2015
When anyone can create a Moment and publish it into Twitter’s Moment stream, then we will have something very interesting. A crowdsourced newspaper.
Think about following an event like Twitter’s Flight conference via the Moments interface. It would be way better than all the liveblogging services that I had to rely on yesterday as I wanted to follow what was going on there.
But a curated set of tweets could be used to cover a lot of interesting stories and events. You can see the potential of it in the current Moments stream, but the total number of Moments is small and not that many of them are interesting to me right now. Opening up Moments as a platform will change all of that. I can’t wait until that happens.
