Twitter's Jinen Kamdar discusses company's dedicated apps for celebrities to aid in interacting with fans and creating unique content for Moments
Lucas Matney / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter is following the playbook Facebook set with its own dedicated app for the famous: give stars a separate toolset rather than cramming creator workflows into the main feed. Jinen Kamdar's pitch centers on two jobs — managing fan interaction and producing exclusive content for Moments, Twitter's curated-story format.
The discussion reads as groundwork for what shipped months later as the Engage app, and it positions Moments as more than an editorial feature: within two years Twitter opened Moments to advertiser sponsorship from select publishers, turning the format Kamdar describes into monetizable inventory.
First-order effects
- Celebrities gain purpose-built tooling for fan interaction and Moments production, reducing their dependence on the consumer app's defaults and giving Twitter a direct line to its highest-reach accounts.
- Moments shifts from a curated editorial product toward a content pipeline celebrities themselves feed, expanding the format's supply.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's earlier celebrity-app move means Twitter is competing for star attention on tooling quality, not just audience size — each platform's creator features become a retention lever against the other.
- Once celebrities supply Moments at scale, advertiser sponsorship of the format gives brands a packaged unit inside premium creator content, bridging organic reach and paid placement.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward platforms splitting into role-specific surfaces — one app for consuming, another for producing and managing audiences — a structure that later shows up in tools like Twitter Spaces and third-party services studios use for personalized fan experiences.
- If creator-facing apps keep multiplying, the durable asset becomes the relationship and workflow layer around stars rather than any single feed, raising switching costs for top talent across platforms.
The trend: Social platforms are carving celebrity management out of the main app into dedicated creator tooling, converting star engagement into a structured, sponsorable supply chain.