Germany’s Der Spiegel published an interview with Twitter CEO Evan Williams yesterday on its website, and Williams had a couple of interesting things to say. You can find a poorly Google-translated version of the interview here, which features Williams answering the usual, boring questions ‘professional’ journalists tend to ask about the micro-sharing service (the reporter opened the interview with the Pulitzer-prize caliber question “so does Twitter spark narcissism and idiocy?”).
But Williams did share something worth noting at the end of the interview.
When asked about possible future features for Twitter, he reportedly said that one of the things being considered is an extension that lets people know what’s happening in their immediate vicinity. That would basically mean that Twitter could actively ping users about local events that are going on in their neighborhood, in real-time, based on the location they’ve indicated. As an example, Williams says users could be alerted to the fact a fire is burning a few streets away from where Twitter knows (or thinks) they are.
It’s not clear if this feature is under development or merely in the idea stage right now, but rarely does anyone from Twitter give so much insight into the startup’s plans for the future in terms of product features, so we’re inclined to believe it’s coming sooner rather than later.
Some questions arise. How frequently would Twitter ping users on local news? In what form (replies, direct messages, SMS, …)? How personalized would this be (what constitutes news for you may not mean the same to your neighbor)? And if it’s only about alerting people in case of emergencies, like the example Williams cites, who would be the one to determine when and why it’s worth sending warning messages out to users? Would they be possibly opening such a feature up to the authorities (police, fire fighters, etc.) so they could be the ones alerting users about potential risks in their vicinity themselves?
Last but not least, could this be an indication of their impending revenue model? If you think about it, location-based marketing messages would fit right into all of the above, for better or worse.
(Hat tip to TechCrunch blogger Serkan Toto)
sounds more like a “push” engine than a search engine.
Wow, Evan is stretching. The twitter platform is great, but expecting neighbors to alert neighbors? Isn’t easier to run down the street like Paul Revere and yell ‘the british is coming?’
The reality is that Facebook with their 10 to 20 fold lead on Twitter, still can’t aggregate down to the neighborhood. Further, it makes no sense for 5,000 neighbors to all connect with each other.
Get real with social media. Stop these absurd stories.
Interesting but can they do it better than us
twitter should start private messaging inbox to real-combat social networks. inbox may have 3 folders – messages from following people, and from followers, and from public.
Twitter would be great to local breaking news, since it can work in realtime.
I’ve already had some real-world experience with this. Recently, my neighborhood had a power outage; I was able to find out what was going on and report to my neighbors as more NStar trucks appeared on my street. There’s definitely potential in localized tweets.
The introduction and questions by Spiegel are quite condescending towards twitter and the American business culture. I am embarrassed for my country. This is exactly why Germany is limping behind everyone else when it comes to real innovation and why my folks are stuck producing cars for the rest of their lives: Too many backwards thinking concrete heads that for their own live can’t think beyond their very limited horizon.
What they don’t get is that innovation starts with supporting ideas and experimentation instead of bad mouthing everything they don’t get right out of the gate. Ahhhh, and then of course the old “but it doesn’t make any money and it is unpredictable how and when it will” – that’s way to much risk for me German ueber conservationist (is that a word?).
Congratulations my German friends, you are just missing the next step in human / technology evolution. Hint: This is why Silicon Valley is in America and not in historic Germania!!!
Hereby I apologize to Evan in the name of the (few) innovative and forward thinking Germans for the brutal interview. They’ll pay the price for their stupidity and ignorance soon enough (Can’t wait till they go to the deadpool or are acquired by twitter the media giant of 2015 – RIP Spiegel).
I am so glad I am out of there
Could not agree more, I was very embarrassed reading the interview.
But then again I’m wondering in total why I still read the Spiegel. Even this week’s main article about Social Networks was a disgrace..
There is only one way: Drop that self congratulating garbage and read English publications, even better, read online and drop mainstream media altogether.
You guys need to get a life. Twitter is for dorks that sit in their rooms all day wishing they had a real life!
As for customizing local pings, you’d probably be able as a user to narrow them down through keywords, like on twitterfall.com for example
a functional ‘tweeps near me’ as a local service – is this part of the monetization plan?
I’ve recently been using Particls – a sort of track feature that’s in public beta – and one of the keywords I’ve added is my home town.
It has been *really* interesting to see the conversation take shape around local issues, mostly from disjointed groups of people who know about each other, but not other local twitter users (there aren’t that many yet).
I’ve been stunned by the awesome ability to connect strangers who have some commonality of experience, even in the mundane; given people also do a large % of their buying – not to mention experiencing and living – in their locality, this would be a pretty powerful thing to really leverage…
I Think, It’s a good idea..
I think twitter is the most intriguing company in the bay. The possibilities with their service are truly endless.
Boris
http://www.thew...war.com/twitter
I think the next thing they should do is something along the lines of like bbcode, would dramatically improve functionality and user experience.
yeah yeah, off topic I know.
“based on the location they’ve indicated”
How about if im at work? then i would be interessted in local events around that neigbourhood..
Twitter is the new AP
Great comparison!
Sure why not. They pretty much do that already. You simply go to their search and subscribe to your local place keyword. Hopefully your town is unique enough.
it’s really interesting n googd idea. i think twitter will be more popular day by day bcoz of it’s simple structure n app.
http://twitter.com/anoopdreams
This is already done by wikimetro.org Users send their tweets or text messages that appear live from wherever they live. Works great.
thats a good news to all .
So they could force you to follow a local sponsor/local pusher of information or both that appear in your feed – you have no control over it. It would all be based upon IP address, not user location input.
They Twitter a few times a day about local happenings and deals. They make their money from local advertisers and pay Twitter a cut of that.
Something like http://nearbytweets.com/ ? Which lets you know … well … nearby tweets.
@BrickandClick
Yeah, I use and recommend that site to new Twitters, even though it’s really just a barely dressed up version of what you can do on http://search.t...er.com/advanced. “Trends” and “Local” searching are what really made Twitter click for me. Twitter will be wise to put these things more front and center.
This is why I follow back anyone from metro Atlanta, and use hashtags #atl, #atlmedia, #atlwhatever when Twittering Atlanta-specific items. Particularly bad weather and crime incidents. Of which we have plenty to keep us all quite busy Twittering our fingers off.
EJ
Agree that Twitter can and would do a much better job at this. Overall, a GREAT idea, as it would create an unparalleled user generated hyper local info/news service.
I’ve been hoping and pushing, several years now, for my town to offer timely crime reports and information. It takes days for the gov’t/police website to update, and about as long for the local (and worthless) newspaper site to do the same. I’d sign up in an instant for my local police and fire to send me DM crime/fire/important alerts.
@BrickandClick
Wow! That sounds familiar? http://www.flairjax.com/?p=60
I think it would be a cool idea, as long as they give you the option to turn on/off the alerts if you like. Alerts being forced on me doesn’t sound so great. If I choose the get my information from other sources, I’d rather keep it that way. Each user should be able to choose if they want it under settings.
Interesting perspective, but not far off in reality. I have seen many fine examples of the “news” or messages being spread like wildfire during events. This could be considered a social news network at that point. Especially with the use of hashtags.
One of the best examples I saw recently was the use of the hashtag #bozexplod; being used during a tragic happening in Bozeman, MT.
I am not sure how Twitter could make a revenue model based around serving up “news”.
I think geo location + twitter is really fun.
I could see this function of Twitter replacing freelance reporters. Used Internationally would it could provide news faster. I saw a stat that Twitter is ~8 min faster than AP posts. In addition, what is very unique is that the opportunity to connect with strangers will always be there.
It’s an amazing idea, if it can be implemented in all our location. It’s a great addition to the way we receive information. Twitter will be a great asset to more and more people.
Great. That’s all we need is to give more virtual soapboxers an uncontrolled channel to get attention and create content that is called “News.” People, would you read a paper where anyone could write short blips without any controls?
Unless they can come up with a high quality trust and filtering mechanism, this feature will only be used by the very naive and in times where something unsubstantiated and written by dorks is better than nothing.
We actually built something very similar a few months ago. Check out twitter.com/02138now as an example.
I think the “poorly translated google verrsion” comment is funny. You have no idea how hard it is to do good machine translation, absolutely none. Much harder than posting inane news on a subject that everyone else has already tweeted thousands of times. Tech crunch is behind the curve and rapidly becoming the CNN of the tech reporting- Always a minute too late.
I’m sure the anonymous troll commenters on CNN disagree.
So you don’t even speak German and you rely on a Google translation to write this and also make comments about professional journalists? Seriously. Do you even know what Der Spiegel is? Get your head out of your ass and look around. There is a lot to the world. You’ll be surprised.
Well German is only my fifth language and it’s a little rusty.
German is my first language and I am embarrassed about the interview. Der Spiegel is the incarnation of the German let’s look backwards while everyone is going forwards mentality. Keep going Germany, history is waiting for you.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Germany, but whether it was the infamy of first half of the 20th Century, or the massive dislocation of the second half, I can’t think of any country that should be more motivated to move away from its past…
So how are they going to control the quality of the posts so that anyone with a brain will want to read the posts from these millions of egomaniacs looking to get seen?
Everybody has a virtual soapbox to be heard, but who really cares what most have to say?
Definitely makes sense that they would go this route. People will always say “So-and-so already does this…” but those sites don’t have near the traffic/user interaction that Twitter does.
It will be interesting to see how Twitter integrates geo-location in the future.
How about expanding more mobile coverage.. In our country, there are only few people who has nice phones (…iPhone and the likes) but we have large volume of mobile users that they could tap.. Allowing us to use our not so cool phone to ‘tweet’ through telecom companies.
I think it’s a good idea, that I myself was looking at …. would be good to see how twitter rolls it out.
We must be REALLY screwed when they’re asking for advice from these ‘twits’.
I attended a SocialDevCamp East event almost a year ago, and 2 different people were working on this type of service. The NearbyTweets.com site seems to be what one of them was trying to do. A developer was describing the methods to geo-code for different ways that people describe geography, such as “midtown Manhattan”, Soho, East Village, etc.
@twoons
Anyone that doubts the local power of Twitter in an emergency only has to search twitter for #vicfires #bushfires.
During the historic fires last month Twitter was a valuable resource for communities and fire agencies alike.
I wouldn’t call that news. Raw notes do not constitute news, and those are just raw notes. Journalists -professional or not- take those notes and write a story. That’s news.
Germany rules, USA sucks
Check out Twitter User @rsylvester for some pretty extensive use of Twitter to cover news. He’s a court reporter who is currently covering a trial in federal court with Twitter updates from the courtroom. Recently did a murder trial in state court as well. Both required permission from the court, and have been very, very well received.
kdl
Actually i use twitter all the time, but the sad truth about twitter is simple, http://www.open...h-about-twitter
As someone who worked in the business of news(oxymoron? but real), i see this as good and bad. Good because it allows more local level news to percolate into the news system through alternate channels. The pecking order of traditional journalism means a lot of stuff gets thrown out of the list in a newsroom. It can break down barriers between the perceived elites in a newsroom and the common audience and thereby make the impact of news more understandable to the audience. The danger is the decline of the editorial. The editorial is the one defining characteristic of a news organisation and without it, news on the streets is like unleashed dogs in suburbia. I think the real value of twitter lies in wire services using it as a pure b2b platform for their insitutional customers.
As someone who worked in the business of news(oxymoron? but real), i see this as good and bad. Good because it allows more local level news to percolate into the news system through alternate channels. The pecking order of traditional journalism means a lot of stuff gets thrown out of the list in a newsroom. It can break down barriers between the perceived elites in a newsroom and the common audience and thereby make the impact of news more understandable to the audience. The danger is the decline of the editorial. The editorial is the one defining characteristic of a news organisation and without it, news on the streets is like unleashed dogs in suburbia. I think the real value of twitter lies in wire services using it as a pure b2b platform for their insitutional customers.
I work for a large electrical utility company, we have been exploring using Twitter to update customers about outages in their area. if Twitter could truely develop a location based news feed, I think it would be an ideal platform for the informaiton we want to give out. basically we want to inform the customers what streets we have heard from that are reporting no power, so the customer will know if they are part of an outage, if thier street has not been reported yet, or if they are single issue. The of course we want to be able to update thoes customers with restoration information in real time.
well that is a change of pace for twitter. But I thought other users service news. And the idea is kinda weird. not feeling it really, they should go out and help the other people.
It’s easy, just use zip codes as topic names to which users can subscribe to as well as can be auto-subscribed on sign-up.
A single bot can tag news with ZIP codes (fudge user location and cities mentioned) then tweet title, link, and #zips.
Subscription UI should let user include nearby ZIPs as well as nearby major cities with a single-click.
It’s basically a one man-month (or one god-week) project. ;-p
Maybe this will actually make Twitter useful :p
I’d rather rely on tracking local news through news media than relying on rumors and gossips generated by twitter’s crowd. As is the case, one can track neighborhood news through local media which are generally verified and vetted. Twitter in this regard would only generate duplicates and redundant information.
what will really get interesting is when you can combine location based with social (what people i know like/recommend) and contextual (what’s relevant to me explicitely requested or inferred) information… this will be game changing IMO
This seems like a natural way for Twitter to evolve. It already serves an immediate news, on-the-ground function. Pairing it with a local geo survey isn’t a huge stretch. Interesting!
Very very cool, and more effective than emergency radio broadcasts of a catastrophe happens. But I already get local news from my Providence Journal’s twitter account, but this is even better.
This direction has potential. I use http://livekick.com twitter alerts exactly for this today for live music concerts – I get direct message from livekick via twitter every time one of my fave bands announces a concert near my location.
Hi,
I did the interview. I just like to know one thing: How many of you guys actually speak German? And how rusty exactly is the German of the author that wrote this?
If the author of this article would have used more than a translation tool to research his article, he might have realized that in the interview, Evan points out that implementing a local service is an idea, he does not say anything about this project being in an production state – so far to the speculation that techcrunch is, well yes, sparking.
Which brings me to the my second point: I did not condescent to Evan. And, just to get this straight: I thing twitter is a really interesting social project.
I, however, confronted him with some aspects that are in my opinion worth considering – for example the potentaial of self-inscenation or the fact that politicians are forgetting about everything they’ve learned about how to cope with the media – because they might have underestimated twitter’s public power. I did not say it is twitters fault that this happened. I rather discussed the behaviour of some congress-members during an Obama-speech.
Another question that I rose in the interviw was how twitter is planning to win money. Some people in this thread are bashing me for this. But I believe I am not the only person in the valley that is wondering about this.
So, if any one wants to confront me directly with criticism, I will have an open ear at stefan_schultz@spiegel.de – elsewise, I’d like you to refrain from turning your anger into a general bashing of Germans.
Kind regards
Stefan Schultz
you might as well twotter me @drhelmutsoul1