The Twitter Times – a new paradigm for news consumption

Using Twitter to read news

More often people use Twitter for:  1) getting news, read something interesting 2) to communicate/chat 3) as an easy way to present her authority online. First usage is probably the most widespread.

In Twitter, you explicitly build your community of people who interests you. Naturally, news items, recent blog posts and jokes popular and actively discussed by your tweeps, are interesting for you. Community of your tweeps is the best filter for the massive volume of daily news.

But since you collect more than ~300 tweeps it starts to be difficult to follow them all. From Mashable's post: "Some of us are starting to deal with what we recently dubbed followholism. You’ve followed so many people, it’s hard to keep up..." Usually you just glance over the most recent pages of tweets and quickly try to determine what is going on today. There is a need for tool that would turn this huge stream of tweets from your friends into a static easy-to-glance-over representation - a newspaper!

We are working on The Twitter Times – a tool that builds a near real-time newspaper of what is new and actively discussed among your friends on Twitter. News are ranked according to some nice combination of recency + popularity among your friends and presented in form of newspaper. You can see who posted the news item and retweet it. It is principally different from news aggregators based on the global popularity such as Techmeme , Tweetmeme or Digg.

Thematic newspapers

In this post @maxgrinev covers the main aspects of The Twitter Times : 1) real-time, 2) personalized 3) media-rich.  I’d like to point out one more implicit feature: a brand new ability to construct thematic newspapers.

The beautiful Twitter feature is its openness – you can follow almost any Twitter user unless she protects her updates, which is quite rare. So, you can build thematic community – create separate account, discover and follow people from a single field:  venture capitalists, AI computer scientists, photographers, fashion addicts …

To discover new people to follow is easy: you can use Twitter directory WeFollow, or just google for something like "VCs to Follow on Twitter" , "Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter" ...

Once you collected followees –let us build newspaper for this account. Such newspaper appears to be thematic by definition. To demonstrate the idea I’ve build 100-VCs newspapers so you can see what is currently discussed among venture capitalists: www.twittertim.es/venturecaps

We will soon create an easier way to construct newspapers without the need to create new Twitter account.

Comments

[Dima Sadakov]

Hello! I am a SPbSTU aspirant perusing a PhD in the 05.13.11 specialization.
Maybe you can help me choose a topic for my dissertation? I'm undecided.

Some broad areas of my interests include semantic web, information-retrieval and relativity, rating systems, user-adaptive systems, intention-driven systems, kinetic-typography UIs, methods for using the social graph & associations to improve usability, and a hundred more fields. They all seem exciting, but I do not have enough knowledge in any given field to find problems to research and solve and make a dissertation.

Perhaps you can help me see which areas are inline with the 05.13.11 specialization and are being actively researched. At least in semantic-web or the area of real-time web-streams. It's hard to understand which parts of it need research investments that would give a topic for dissertation or at least a paper.

By background is programming websites and different web technologies, but only for developing solutions for end-users. My master's thesis project is http://lan-crawler.sf.net which used Lucene for IR and scanned local files within a LAN.

I'll spend my time reading dissertations and trying to find the edge of science in different fields. :)

I can be reached via sadakov@gmail.com, gtalk, twitter/cdima.

Thanks!
Dmitry Sadakov

[Jacopo]

keep on bloggin' pls!
--Jac