NEW MEDIA MATTERS: Twitter's new bluebirds of happiness

Is Twitter a vital news organization or an entertainment platform for pop culture and celebrity gossip? Do you post tweets more than you read them? Most of all do you favorite posts or even share them?

It will be up to all of us as users to decide how Twitter will define itself as it rolls out its new Moments mobile app. This is one big moment for you if you are one of the platform's 316 million active users who prefer a quick scan of topics all in one place.

Twitter describes the target market for Moments as the casual user versus the more engaged power-user. Mostly, Twitter's Moments app is for those who have never fully understood Twitter or its functions and never bothered to figure them out. Twitter's swiftly changing posts continuously flowing across one's screen can create a schizophrenic experience that might not enthrall, say, the baby boomer who has given up her job as a day trader, or the diaper-changing, stay-at-home dad. It can be overwhelming.

Moments, its developers claim, will allow a more concentrated read of specific subjects, creating a friendlier entry into one's Twitter feed. Ultimately its success will depend on contributing, sharing, and favoring tweets with Moments, actions that constitute that elusive phenomenon known as its ROI or return on investment.

Twitter is a behemoth social platform, undergoing recent, massive changes and cuts that involve layoffs of about 8.2 percent of the company's global workforce, or 300 or more of its 4,000-plus employees. Most of these laid-off employees were engineers and two of these were focused expressly on Twitter growth and discovery.

With lots of accompanying fanfare, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has rejoined Twitter as leader and made the sweep this month after assessing the platform's current structure and its tepid user growth in the first quarter. Dorsey announced he's after a more focused Twitter experience and says his team has been working hard to streamline its Vine and Periscope apps, too.

The Vine app allows users to easily create and share six-second looping video clips that result in seriously humorous effects, similar to a bout of six-second hiccups. The last of the trio of Vine co-founders was one of the recent employees cut out of the Twitter loop, despite the app claiming a whopping 200 million active monthly users.

Periscope allows users to stream events live, as-it-happens over social media. It's great for documenting real-time fires, natural disasters, break-ins, animal abuse, grandma going stark-raving nuts and changing her will for no good reason and similar activities. It has great potential for citizen journalism and justice-for-all, but Twitter-owned Periscope recently garnered negative press when a Periscoper streamed video of herself driving drunk, like a stand-up comic. There's one in every crowd, and they usually have an enraptured audience.

Paige Henson is a local writer and a new media consultant for businesses and nonprofits. Email her at paigechenson@gmail.com.

This story was originally published October 20, 2015 at 10:31 PM with the headline "NEW MEDIA MATTERS: Twitter's new bluebirds of happiness ."