After reports of Twitter working to prioritize the camera in mobile apps, a new report claims Twitter could also be looking at mimicking Snapchat’s Discover option inside Twitter Moments, with a focus on photos and video. Three unnamed employees inside the company reportedly told CNBC that the company is considering an update to Twitter Moments that focuses on photos and videos with a geotag, arranging visual content around nearby events.
The purported feature would create a spot inside Twitter Moments for location-based photos and videos. Currently, Twitter Moments is divided into sections for today, news, sports, entertainment, and fun.
The three employees said they have seen a demonstration on the potential update or are otherwise aware of the update, claiming that the feature could open up additional advertising revenue for Twitter. Ads would appear alongside the collection of photos and videos.
Twitter declined to offer an official comment on the matter.
Without an official confirmation, the potential feature isn’t yet out of rumor territory. Those unnamed employees also said that the feature was in early development, so the feature could change drastically before a launch — or not launch at all.
The report comes after a similarly anonymous source from inside the company suggested Twitter was working on a camera-focused design that would shorten the number of steps the app requires to open up the camera.
Snapchat is a widely imitated platform, but Twitter doesn’t seem to be one of the platforms launching a large number of Snapchat-similar features, at least not yet and not in the same extremes. Twitter doesn’t have a Stories feature like the idea Facebook and Instagram borrowed, for example. The 280-character platform also does not have augmented reality masks and stickers inside their built-in camera like Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram.
A focus on photos and video would be a very different direction for the social network focused on 280-character text posts, news, and trending topics. Both reports, however, could be highly exaggerated in their Snapchat-ness. Twitter’s camera-centric anonymous reports didn’t say that the app would open straight to the camera but that the change would reduce the number of steps to opening the camera. (Facebook, for example, doesn’t open to the camera but only requires a swipe.) The latest report suggests a page full of location-based graphics, but navigating away from the usual Twitter feed over to Moments to access it.
With the growth of photo and video content online, Twitter could be simply looking for more ways to integrate visual content, not creating an entirely new focus on them. Time will tell if the purported feature ever makes it into a full rollout.
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