How Twitter’s New Moments Feature Will Enhance the Sports World

No selfies in baseball? Tampa Bay’s Tim Beckham with fans in May. IMAGE: MIKE CARLSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

It’s understandable if some sports fans mistake Twitter as a walled garden built just for us.

There are issues, to be sure, but Twitter is where all the news breaks, and the platform can competently replace watching a game if all you need is score updates and the best highlights. The GIFs are hilarious, and links galore lead to the best of the web’s #content chaos. The ongoing conversation — especially around big events — is unmatched in diversity and intensity.

Meanwhile, perhaps unbeknownst to many casual users lost in Sports Twitter heaven, Twitter the company faces major challenges. Jack Dorsey, newly named CEO, has a long list of problems to tackle.

Chief among those problems is slow user growth. Newcomers to the platform struggle to get hooked by the unique factors that by now seem second nature to more hardcore users.

Twitter on Tuesday introduced a new discovery feature called “Moments” in hopes of tackling this problem. It’s one of the most high-stakes tweaks in the company’s long history of tweaks.

Moments is intended make the company attract more people — sports fans among them — to join the platform. If it works, it will help address that user growth problem. If it doesn’t? Who knows.

But this much seems a safe bet: Moments will definitely make Twitter even more fun for sports fans who already lean on it heavily for news, entertainment and commentary.

Meet Twitter Moments

When the Major League Baseball playoffs begin Tuesday night, fans following along (in the United States only, for now) will immediately notice Twitter’s newly launched Moments feature.

“We finally show users the value of Twitter instantly with no effort required,” Danny Keens, Twitter’s head of sports partnerships, told Mashable in an interview. “We haven’t really done that before.”

On Twitter.com, a lightning-shaped emblem joins the “Home,” “Notifications” and “Messages” options at the top of our screen. On mobile, it looks like what we see at the bottom of this screenshot:

Click here for more.

SOURCE: Mashable – Sam Laird