Twitter has begun rolling out its Moments feature in Australia on Wednesday, offering a new, more curated way to discover trending content and keep tabs on breaking news and live sport. 
While discovery on Twitter previously relied on following the right people, searching for hashtags or clicking on trends - all of which would also inundate users with heaps of potentially irrelevant information - Moments are concise collections of tweets, images and videos from Twitter that have been hand-selected to tell a story or follow a live event.
At Twitter.com and in the Android and iOS apps, the Moments tab shows up as a lightning bolt between the "Home" and "Notifications" buttons.
Moments are organised into four categories - news, sports, entertainment and fun - with the default "Today" screen showing the latest and most important moments up front.
Australia is the fourth market to get access to Moments, behind the US, Britain and Brazil. While some international stories will make their way to Australian Moments users, Twitter says it also hopes its local curation team - made up mostly of people with online journalism backgrounds - will be able to bring home-grown stories to overseas audiences through Moments as well.
Since becoming a publicly traded company in 2013, Twitter has been under pressure to expand its user base beyond news junkies and media types to the kind of broad audience enjoyed by rival Facebook.
The Moments system is designed so that users who like the idea of a live update platform for news and sport can get access to the content they want without having to get their heads around the idiosyncrasies of hashtags, retweets and lists.
As of Wednesday morning, some of the Moments on offer include Cardinal George Pell, Women's History Month, Super Tuesday and Maile Carnegie leaving Google Australia to join ANZ.
Big day @TwitterAU - we're launching Moments! Look out for the lightning bolt on your account soon ?????? #MomentsAUpic.twitter.com/AOsL4hvJ1D
- Twitter Australia (@TwitterAU)     March 1, 2016
In addition to the Moments created by Twitter's in-house team, the company will also authorise local partners to be able to curate and publish their own.
The partners so far include the ABC, BuzzFeed, the NRL, the AFL and The Project. Companies will also be able to pay to create "sponsored" moments.
Like tweets, Moments can be shared, linked to or embedded, and anyone can follow those links to see the full Moment. 
Some collections, such as live sport and breaking news, can also be followed. This will blend new updates from the Moment directly into your Twitter stream.
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