Now Twitter is taking on Snapchat Stories with Moments

TechRadar Twitter
Twitter is changing, again.

If this carries on much longer, there'll be nothing between the major social network apps - after Instagram launched its own version of Snapchat Stories, Twitter has got in on the act by announcing it's making its own Moments feature available to everyone.

For the completely confused, Stories in Snapchat let you create little 24-hour collections of photos and movies that any of your friends can see: it's kind of the equivalent of Facebook's Timeline, but more immediate. The new Instagram Stories does pretty much the same thing.

Moments - which you can see in action on the web at https://twitter.com/i/moments - has been around for a while, but up until now a closed group of human editors have been selecting what's available.

Power to the people

That's going to change soon, Twitter says, with "influencers, partners and brands" getting the opportunity to create Moments first and then everyone else joining in at some unspecified point further down the line.

Moments aren't exactly like Snapchat and Instagram Stories, and they're a lot more fixed in time, but you can see Twitter's thinking behind making the option to create these Moments open to anyone to wants it.

Twitter is having another disappointing year in terms of user growth and revenue, and could certainly use a boost. It's recently opened up the verification process and introduced stickers in an attempt to give it broader appeal in the battle with Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat for users' time.

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David Nield
Freelance Contributor

Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you'll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.