Twitter releases feature showcasing latest happening events

Sheetal Sukhija
11 Oct 2017

CALIFORNIA, U.S. - Twitter has released a new feature called ‘Happening Now’ which is aimed at making latest tweets related to different topics available for newcomers.

The feature launched with the sports tweets first and then expanded to other areas, including entertainment and breaking news.

The feature sounds similar to Twitter’s existing Moments feature, which offers a way to learn more about a topic across a number of categories, including Sports, News and Entertainment.

While Twitter Moments is a curated selection of tweets that narrate a story, Happening Now is aimed at taking users to a dedicated timeline of tweets related to the event at hand.

Further, moments are more visual, featuring images and videos, and is viewed as being Twitter’s version of Snapchat or Instagram’s ‘Stories.’

Twitter posted a demo of the new feature which showed Happening Now events for MLB, NBA, and NFL games which cane be shown at the top of a user’s Twitter timeline.

Users can swipe horizontally through these events, which is each depicted with a title and an image.

When a user taps into a game to see more, the current score appears at the top of a customized timeline containing real-time tweets about the event.

Happening Now also builds on top of Twitter’s understanding of how to sort tweets associated with an event. The tweets will reportedly display algorithmically in these new custom Happening Now timelines.

Interestingly, the new feature will now segregate tweets entirely based on hashtags.

Last year, Twitter introduced features that would allow users to tune into live events via its network and even has features including live video streams of an event.

The feature shot to popularity during the 2016 U.S. Presidential debates.

In 2016, Twitter also updated its homepage for logged-out users so that they could look at various categories of tweets, including News, Sports, Music, Entertainment, and more.

The microblogging site also revamped its Explore section earlier this year.