• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, June 18, 2015

Twitter is preparing to launch a major new feature, dubbed “Project Lightning,” that allows Twitter and its users to aggregate content around events in curated spaces on the platform, including photos and videos, Buzzfeed reported Thursday. Project Lightning will also enable users to share the curated content outside Twitter by embedding them on other sites as well as within third party apps, according to the same report.

When it rolls out later this year, Twitter users can access the new feature via a button on the mobile app’s main page, which will call up a gallery showing top-trending events -- which can mean everything from concerts and festivals to natural disasters and elections (otherwise known as the good, the bad, and the ugly). All that’s required is that it’s a live event and people are talking about it on Twitter.

Twitter users who click on the events button will be able to see collections of tweets with images from the event, curated by Twitter editors for bigger events. Rather than presenting the image-focused tweets in the traditional reverse chronology timeline, Project Lightning will highlight the most visually compelling images and video in full-screen mode, ideal for mobile consumption through swiping.

Buzzfeed notes that in addition to images and videos posted to Twitter, the new service will also incorporate content from Twitter’s other online platforms, including Vines and videos from Periscope. Content is curated in real time, but users can go back through tweets from earlier in the event by swiping backwards, allowing them to “relive” events as they happened. As noted, users can also share the events outside the Twitter platform, in a move that could vastly increase its reach.

At launch Twitter will probably cover around ten events per day, but eventually Twitter plans to open the feature so users can create their own curated events -- even if they’re not necessarily relevant to the broader Twitter audience.