Snapchat showing others the way

RIYADH. KAZINFORM - It seems that social media platforms are closely watching, with a hint of jealousy, the success Snapchat is scoring with its "stories," the cities and live event series of selected snaps by its editors.

This clever feature has enabled the platform to attract so many users, increasing its exposure across other platforms and providing an unprecedented product that allows users to truly feel and be part of live events.

While writing this piece, Snapchat is broadcasting a story covering the celebration of Golden State Warriors, the NBA champions and it is so amazing that you just feel that you are attending the parade yourself. Twitter has also decided to step up its game in this arena. It has just announced its plans of releasing a new feature on the platform later this year, a live events coverage feature called "Project Lightning." In a recent interview with Buzzfeed, the company executives presented their plans to enhance the experience of the platform users with this new feature. Similar to the concept of Snapchat "Stories," Twitter is planning to gather tweets covering major events in news, sports and music, and place them in a new menu after editing them to enable users to follow these events in a controlled and organized way, Kazinform has learnt from the Arab News. "Unlike Twitter's existing search tools, content that appears in the live events section will be curated by a team of editors led by Twitter's head of media, Katie Jacobs Stanton. The events will heavily emphasize photos and video, with full-screen images and auto-playing videos, along with tweets that Twitter's curators identify as relevant," Mashable reported about the new feature. Instead of the usual timeline interface of twitter, these events will be shown in a full-screen format, displaying tweets and photos and videos in chronological order to give users a sense of how the event is unfolding in real time. "It's a brand-new way to look at tweets," Kevin Weil, Twitter's head of product, told Buzzfeed as reported on Mashable. "This is a bold change, not evolutionary." Rolling out such new features could be the cure Twitter is looking for to address the issue of engagement and users growth. One of the most argued shortcomings of the platform is that its users feel that they are left out whenever not logged on, they simply miss the important events taking place on their timeline and they have to go and search for it, such a feature, which would keep the important events gathered in one menu so a user could check it out any time, could be the answer for this shortcoming. According to Mashable, "Project Lightning has reportedly been in the works since January. Twitter's recent CEO shuffle will have no impact on its rollout, soon-to-be CEO Jack Dorsey said."