Twitter introduces Timestamps to share key moments from events

By Anuj Sharma - March 30, 2018
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“Sharing Timestamps is easy. When you tap to share a live video, you can easily slide back to the exact time you want your audience to watch. From there, add your thoughts, and Tweet it to the world....

Micro-blogging website Twitter today introduced Timestamps that gives users an easy way to Tweet that brief moment of what matters from longer, live videos.

Previously, users could only Tweet an entire live video, which made it difficult to discuss what matters most. With Timestamps, anyone can Tweet a live or replay video starting from the exact moment they want to discuss.

“Sharing Timestamps is easy. When you tap to share a live video, you can easily slide back to the exact time you want your audience to watch. From there, add your thoughts, and Tweet it to the world,” Twitter said in a blog post.

Anyone seeing your Tweet will start watching at the time within the video you shared. If the broadcast is still live, they can easily skip to what’s happening by tapping “live” at any time. The feature is available for any live video, whether from a professional content publisher or someone broadcasting from their phone.

Timestamps are rolling out today on Twitter for Android and iOS, Twitter.com and Periscope.

Earlier this month, Twitter was said to be working on a new Snapchat Discover-like feature that focuses on photos and videos attached to specific events.

While the exact details about the feature are still obscure, we know about the ‘camera first feature’, which is designed to encourage users to share in a huge number photos and videos tied to a news that often breaks via Twitter.

If the feature sees the light of the day, it will directly compete with Snapchat Discover and Snap Maps – both of which curate story-based current events.

A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on the report, but it's not surprising that Twitter would want to build such a feature, a report in CNBC said.

And while Twitter advertises itself as a platform for ‘what’s happening,’ Snapchat in the recent past has become most visited app to get a first-person view of breaking news. Plus, it’s not Twitter but Snapchat that user go to get a raw, unfiltered look at what's happening during a major event like the Olympics, gadgets show, during an event of natural disaster or a mass shooting, which undoubtedly is a worrying trend for Twitter.

And for long Twitter has been working hard to ensure that their platform stays on top when news happens. With a ‘camera first feature’, Twitter wants to give users an easy way to share photos and videos, which can later be pulled into Moments that would make a lot of sense to the company.

After a run of 12 years, and four years as a public listed company, Twitter finally announced in February to have made a profitable quarter – a long anticipated milestone to satisfy investors. But still the problem of getting more people to understand and use Twitter remains.

Since its inception, Twitter has hassled to grow user base and to increase product focus. While those problems are still not solved, the micro-blogging platform remains tiny compared to Facebook and Instagram, which has 800 million monthly users.

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