Twitter’s Lighting news aggregation service, to be called ‘Moments’
08 Jul 2015
Twitter's news aggregator service, known earlier as Project Lighting, will be rebranded 'Moments', according to a slip of the tongue from Periscope's chief executive.
CEO of the live broadcasting app owned by Twitter, Kayvon Beykpour, gave the name away during an interview with The Telegraph, in which he spoke about the news service.
He said, ''I would say that Moments and ideas like that are just extensions and reinforcements to that vision. Twitter is the only tool in the world today that actually shows you the world live, other than Periscope, so I think it's great that they're working on things like Moments to improve that.''
The announcement of the service came last month as Project Lightning, and a Twitter spokesperson confirmed that Beykpour had indeed been talking about this when mentioning Moments during the interview.
The service comes as the social network's attempt at handing users better control over aggregated tweets and content, which would make it easier to follow live events.
The effort would be led by the head of Twitter's global media operations, Katie Jacobs Stanton, who would curate content related to these events such as tweets, photos, videos, Vines and Periscope broadcasts, with the resulting stream of content available to view by users and non-users alike.
However, a Twitter spokesperson had confirmed since the interview that, while Beykpour had referred to Project Lightning, the name was still "undetermined at this stage".
The details of Project Lightning were revealed last month. The feature looked to turn passive users into active users, and get them tweeting, retweeting and "favouriting" tweets as against trending topics, hashtags and absorbing information without taking part.
Project Lightning, or Moments, would offer a better way to curate and aggregate tweets and content from a certain life event for users in one place, so that they could follow updates more easily.
It would take the form of a button in the centre of the home row on the mobile app, clicking which would lead to a screen showing different events currently generating a lot of tweets.
