If you've ever found Twitter too overwhelming for regular use, you might want to give it another try: The social network's trying really, really hard to accommodate frazzled users like you.
On Tuesday, Twitter revealed the latest attempt to tame its fire hose: it's a people-curated feature called “Moments”, which will let some publishers (including The Washington Post) gather tweets around news and “cultural” events and publish them as collections. Instead of having to sift through hundreds of tweets or dig into hashtags to understand breaking news, Twitter users will only have to click into stories on Twitter's “Moments” tab to see the most important, human-curated tweets and Vines. Non-users can view Moments, too, both at Twitter.com and embedded on outside sites. Observe Marutaro, the best hedgehog online.
Twitter has said the tool will eventually roll out to all users, and not merely “editorial partners,” like news organizations, NASA and Major League Baseball. But it's still an interesting admission that, counter nearly a decade of grandiose Twitter rhetoric, we may actually need information gatekeepers to help us decide what to look at.
After all, the average American consumes five times as much information now as he did 20 years ago; at some point, the brain straight-up runs out of processing power. As two research psychologists told me in April, the brain just isn't structured to consume and digest the amount of information available on Twitter.
“The modern brain hasn't evolved to keep up,” explained Daniel Levitin, a cognitive psychologist and the author of the bestseller “The Organized Mind.” “That's why we feel so exhausted all the time.”
Twitter, needless to say, does not want to exhaust you - that sort of reaction is unlikely to fuel user growth. And so we've seen developments like Highlights (a “summary of the best tweets for you”) and the redesigned homepage (where even non-users can view curated feeds around news topics). Nuzzel, a social start-up that Twitter has somehow not yet acquired, has raised millions off the claim that it can make your social feeds more manageable.
Are they yet? Well, not entirely: Moments is limited, for instance, by its emphasis on events. But it is becoming increasingly clear that Twitter's future is less about the stream - and more about the dams.
The Washington Post