Twitter opens up Moments tool to the public as lead curator departs

What is Twitter? With the introduction of Moments last year, a tab with Buzzfeed-like curated lists of Tweets, that question felt like it finally may have had an answer.

For most people Twitter is a consumption platform and Moments was a new feature which leant into that. Without following anybody Twitter Moments allowed users to catch up on the best of Twitter, with an editorial staff putting together fresh stories every day.

Yet last week Marcus Mabry, the head of Moments curation in the US, left Twitter. Now we may know why.

Today Twitter has launched a Moments creation tool on desktop, which could effectively put some Twitter Moments curators out of the job. Effectively now anybody can create a Twitter Moment. So if you see a really crazy tweet storm happening you can easily collate a bunch of tweets into a mobile-friendly, magazine-style flow.

It’ll be interesting to see whether the crowdsourcing approach to Moments works, and whether it does actually reduce the need for an experienced editorial team.