Dive Brief:

• Twitter officially launched Moments, the site's new curated news experience (also known as Project Lightning), on Tuesday morning – one day after newly-minted permanent CEO Jack Dorsey took his post.
• The highly-anticipated feature may be the biggest change since Twitter added images to tweets.
• Moments is intended to make Twitter more accessible to new users, and will showcase streams of tweets around trending topics and live events, such as breaking news, awards shows, or sports games.

Dive Insight:

With Moments, the micro-blogging site hopes to have found the cure for its slow user growth. The new tab pulls in and curates content around real-time events, including autoplay videos and photos. The key selling point is that the feature will be available to anyone, regardless of whether they are logged in to Twitter. This will help Twitter simplify its value proposition for hesitant non-users, with the ultimate goal of reaching new would-be users. 

In September at the Dmexco conference in Germany, Twitter's new COO Adam Bain said one of the biggest issues with Twitter's abundance of content is that it's hard for people to sift through. "What Project Lightning [or Moments] aims to do is organize content for consumers in easy, digestible ways, even if they don't follow some of these accounts," he said at the time.

Upon its Tuesday release, Moments Product Manager Madhu Muthukumar told The Verge that Twitter is "looking for people who have either tried and kind of given up, or people who use it and know there’s good content there but for one reason or another they haven’t really gotten the experience that we all get out of it here — which is this rich, amazing source of the world’s voices."

Whether Moments will become a powerful real-time advertising channel for marketers remains unclear. A handful of Moments streams will be put together by a list of announced partners. That list currently includes BuzzFeed, Fox News, Bleacher Report, MLB, NASA, Mashable, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Getty Images, Entertainment Weekly and Vogue. The feature is initially available in the U.S. on iPhone, Android, and the web.