TWITTER'S HAVING A MOMENT

These are twitchy times at Twitter.

Put simply, CEO Jack Dorsey, who took the helm on Monday, needs to attract more punters to the social network. The rate of growth is stalling.

 Competition is coming from all sides, not least from Instagram which celebrated its fifth birthday this week and used the anniversary to trumpet its 400 million users. That’s nearly 100 million more than the relatively elderly Twitter which turns 10 next year.

Growth in the number of Twitter’s monthly active users has all but levelled out – just two million newbies signed up in the  second quarter of this year

Whether Twitter marks its tenth birthday next March with celebrations depends in large part to the success of Moments which launched on Monday.

The latest feature, with the touch of a lightning bolt icon, curates big news events into a coherent package of the best comments, pictures and videos.

Moments scoops up all the disparate bits into a hopefully satisfying whole, collating tweets from the people on the ground and feeds from news organisations, whether the user follows them or not.

All this content harvesting is done by a team of humans in New York rather than computer algorithms.

It’s all part of a general trend towards “distributed content” which another Twitter rival Snapchat kicked off in January with its “Discover” section.

The aim for Twitter is that Moments will not only attract new users but re-engage the old ones who may have become tired of the random splurge of information on their feeds.

So far, Moments is only available in the US but plans to roll it out across Europe are in the pipeline.

While Moments might be seen as a welcome addition for some users, it’s another step away from the founding philosophy of Twitter as an open stream platform.

Along with that, there are rumours the defining 140 character tweet limit might be ditched soon to allow longer posts.

These tweet tweaks, changing the things that made Twitter unique in the first place, could lead to a chipping away of its identity.

That in turn could potentially make it even tougher to thrive in an increasingly crowded market.