Let’s say you’re a person who doesn’t care about Twitter’s stock price, org chart or MAU growth. What’s the best way to describe “Moments,” the new multimedia feature the company launched today?
Twitter Moments Are Like Snapchat’s Live Stories, Except They’re on Twitter
Same video, different platforms.
Snapchat / Twitter
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
It’s like Snapchat’s Live Stories.
My colleague Kurt Wagner noted earlier that Moments has “striking similarities” to Live Stories. But Kurt is very polite, so he may have felt bad about spelling it out: It’s the same thing. Live Stories is a series of video clips and pictures of an event, strung together for an ADHD user base. So are Moments.
But it’s not just that the two things use the same concept. They share the same content.
A Re/code reader sent in these two screenshots this morning of the identical video, taken from Snapchat’s “Monday Night Football” Live Story and Twitter’s “Seahawks hold off Lions for win” Moment.
Here’s the full video (via Twitter):
https://twitter.com/Lions/status/651180955101597696
So is it a bad thing that Twitter’s first big move in the New Jack Dorsey Era is a product that works like one of its competitors? I don’t think so: Live Stories may be Snapchat’s most promising feature, and if Twitter can integrate its own version into the service, that seems like a plus.
@Jack isn’t going to get points for originality — just popularity.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
