Twitter today revealed a change in how its "Moments" feature will work during the weeks of the Summer Olympic Games being held in Rio de Janeiro beginning August 5. A new tab for the Rio Olympics will be added to Moments -- and every platform the Twitter feature is available for -- but now users will be able to pipe news from the tab and into their own timeline for the entirety of the Olympic Games, which run until August 21.
Previously, Moments would only fill up a user's timeline with news from any particular channel for a couple of hours, sometimes as long as a few days, but the Rio Olympics mark the first time the feature has been extended to nearly a month (via TechCrunch). Like with traditional Moments, when the event is over, the tweets and news disappear from your timeline completely.
Twitter hopes that this will allow those interested in the Olympics to follow along with news and updates coming out of the ceremony with minimal hassle, since they won't need to go in and specifically follow individual news personalities, media companies, and olympians -- whom they might just end up unfollowing when it's all over anyway.
You’ll see the option to follow country specific Moments, which will last throughout the Games, so the best of what’s happening with your team will appear in your timeline for the entirety of the Olympics. You can also just opt to follow your favorite sports and events to see these Tweets in your timeline, or catch up on what you missed every day with recap Moments that will highlight results, medal counts and more. Of course, when a Moment that you follow ends, so do the Tweets, leaving your timeline the way it was before.
The following mechanic in Moments isn't restricted to blanketed "Olympics" coverage either, since users will be able to temporarily subscribe to "their favorite sports and events," like coverage of a specific country's results or news out of the Gymnastics finals. In addition, when users visit Moments during the Olympic Games, each day it will be updated to include recaps of event results, medal wins, "and other notable newsworthy items."
The Moments tab is currently available in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom and the United States. These countries, in addition to Germany, France, and Japan, will also get "country specific Moments" during the Rio Olympics this year. The bolstered Olympics tab in Moments will begin rolling out "in the coming days," but users can already prepare for the Olympics by reading its dedicated tab in Twitter's lightning bolt Moments menu right now.
In order to take advantage of the massive influx of tweets and users during the Olympics, and battle some recent negative growth statistics, Twitter is also preparing 207 team emojis for the social network, activated when users tweet with the appropriate hashtag of their favorite country. Of course, the company's own Periscope and Vine apps will have featured Rio-related channels and content to keep fans engaged throughout the month of August.
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