Load the Game

Twitter reveals new project Lightning

• Christopher Graf
• June 18th, 2015

Twitter has used its gargantuan success to reach the masses of people on the Internet. Even just those who use Twitter have been able to capture this success to spread out the following of their own careers. It’s hard for a company this vast to increase its user base after going public in 2013. For their next endeavor, however, they may not have to.

Twitter has now unveiled details of its new project, Lightning. Focusing on specific events, Lightning will bring content around the Internet surrounding these events straight to users. Twitter is also going to pre-cache images and videos in a way so as to make any load time nearly nonexistent. Images and videos can come from Twitter itself, Vine, Periscope, and many more. Logged in Twitter users can specifically follow any event they want, having its content become more prominent on their home feed. Once the event has ended, however, so does the content. Then Lightning will move on to the next big thing.

Live coverage will also be possible with the project. It has even been stated that Lightning could even get some exclusive content by from partners of Twitter looking to build their followings. Seems natural since Twitter users love to live tweet certain events.

The great thing about Lightning is all of the content will be there, whether you’re a logged in member of Twitter or not. All special event media, including tweets, will come directly to those using Lightning. With this, I would have to speculate that it will be a standalone app being developed by Twitter. We’ll still have to wait some time as the report by Buzzfeed explained that we are still months away from the actual launch.