Twitter on its way to #1 realtime information powerhouse
The title may be wrong as they already are #1. But I wanted to bring the act of their transformation into it.
Andreas Klinger, one of my mentors, wrote a new blogpost: Sh*t… twitter is exciting… again! In a nutshell, Twitter is using the massive content from their users to generate the best realtime news in the world. Nobody else has the manpower to do that. And they are pushing to generate better ways to consume that stuff than in 140 character streams. He thinks one step ahead that Twitter will provide news outlets with the tools to moderate the realtime content for their publications.
I may be the wrong person to give feedback on that as I don’t read any conventional news on a regular base, but as he asked me too, I will throw in some thoughts.
Most people are still lurkers
This is good news for all media companies. People like to consume. Only thing that changed that they talk about what the consume online and not only in their peer group. Distribution grows. Some write comments. Mostly unimportant.
80%* of Tweets aren’t original content
People link to articles, reply to famous sources and retweet. *I make this numbers up.
New elite
Most of the famous sources became famous in the conventional media world. It wasn’t to hard to translate the attention into online. But a new class of highly connected individuals came up and they are able to push news in a similar way.
Lurkers become one hit wonders
This is the most important part. They are everywhere and if something important happens, boom. Nobody is able to achieve the same speed. This is the part that Twitter needs to show. They already do it with Trends. But that is only the testing area. Being able to say what exactly is the important part of the trends is essential.
Wavii in realtime
I love Wavii. Just look at the related news (sry, only way to give a live sneak peak at the moment). One sentence per event. I can follow hundreds of topics and know everything important by sifting five minutes per day through the feed. This is who I want news to look like. That’s the interesting part. Sometimes I will dig deeper, of course, but not for most of the stuff. If Wavii would not only look at newssites but also Twitter, this would be the most awesome news thing of the last years.
Realtime news will be written by one-time-wonder-lurkers (hudson, osama,…), new elite (everyone who puts his spare time into Twitter to connect and stuff) and conventional media (these will be merged into the new elite or the other way round). Some of it being reported on Twitter itself and some on websites to whom Twitterer link and make it go boom.
I will check out teleportd now as Andreas suggested.
Disclaimer: I can’t predict the future. Don’t take this stuff to serious and rather see it as inspiration who we can build the future.
Personal thoughts.
