Twitter Moments arrives on Indian social app Daily Hunt
First time ever outside of the U.S.
Twitter has made news in recent times, be it the ban on a US President, or acquiring a podcast app Breaker in order to expand its reach to the world of audio content. Now, the microblogging service is all set to launch its curated content feed in India, making it the first region outside of the United States to get the service.
The company said it had partnered with Dailyhunt, a Bangalore-based company that created an app to aggregate news and content across multiple Indian languages to launch Twitter Moments in India. Going forward the Dailyhunt app would get a new tab called "Twitter Moments India" that would showcase curated tweets around news and world events.
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Twitter is hoping to dive into the broader reach across the smaller cities and towns of India that Dailyhunt possesses due to its focus on the vernacular content. In the past mobile insight firm App Annie had estimated that only 75 million monthly active users were on Twitter in India.
On the other hand, Dailyhunt is a Bangalore-based company that recently raised $100 million from Google, Microsoft and AlphaWave to expand its coverage into more languages as part of its strategy to double its existing user base of 285 million per day. The application was launched 10 years ago on both Android and iOS.
The app serves content in 14 local languages and is looking up to Twitter's curation expertise to enhance its reach. The company, in a statement, described this as its biggest collaboration to date, but did not disclose any financial information around the partnership. Incidentally, Twitter holds a stake in ShareChat, which is one of the competitors of Dailyhunt in India.
“At Twitter, we are committed to doing what we can to ensure people can keep up with what the world is talking about at any given time. Moments — a curated set of Tweets about a particular topic — are a powerful way to do so. With this partnership with Dailyhunt, a platform that caters to diverse languages and readers from all parts of India, we are thrilled to extend Twitter Moments to the Dailyhunt app,” said Manish Maheshwari, Managing Director of Twitter India, in a statement.
Umang Bedi, co-founder of Dailyhunt, said, “the past year has shown us the power of public opinion and awareness and it is incumbent upon us to mobilize this discourse by making information more accessible, more reliable, and more engaging. When a trusted partner with our shared vision of enabling consumers to create and share information without barriers validates our platform with their presence, we know we are on the right path.”
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Twitter is primarily hoping to enhance its presence among the smaller cities and towns of India and it is hoping that it could piggyback on both Dailyhunt and Sharechat to achieve its goals.
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A media veteran who turned a gadget lover fairly recently. An early adopter of Apple products, Raj has an insatiable curiosity for facts and figures which he puts to use in research. He engages in active sport and retreats to his farm during his spare time.