Twitter has quickly turned into one of the best places to discover new media — be it video, images, or links — as soon as it comes out. Videos that may take hours or even days to surface on sites like Digg can virally spread across Twitter in a fraction of the time. As Fred Wilson put it, the value of Twitter lies in “the power of passed links”.
TuneIn, a new startup presenting today at today’s RealTime CrunchUp, is looking to harness this media and present it in an easily searchable, consumable format.
Using the site should be pretty straightforward for anyone who has used the main Twitter web interface. You’ll see your normal Twitter feed in the center of the page, but on the right side you’ll also see a list of the latest article links, videos, and photos that your Twitter friends have shared. You can choose to sort these shared links by popularity (the more Tweets a link gets, the more popular it becomes) or simply by time. And if you’d prefer to see media shared by only a select group of the people you follow, you can break Twitter users into groups (called Channels).
If you’d like to browse only media and ignore other tweets entirely, you can do that too by hitting the ‘media’ tab on the left hand side of the page. Content is filtered into three columns: ‘articles’, ‘video’, and ‘images’, or you can arrange everything into a handy grid with thumbnails of each item.
TuneIn isn’t the first startup to do this kind of media aggregation: Tweetmeme has been using Twitter to surface hot articles, images, and video for quite a while.
Here’s the video from the demo of TuneIn at the event:
Haha… I like how there quickly become a new blog post after each demo at Crunch Up!
Anyway, this product looks pretty cool. I want a channel!
I’m gonna request a beta!
Uh oh… their Beta request system is broken!!!!!!!!!!!!
clever, very clever. I hope we can view videos inside the application. Shame we can’t register though
Too bad the registration is non-op.
Cool site I will keep my eye on this. I’ve been trying to discover new media on twitter since a couple of days ago but I’m struggling with the bias produced by the fans of mileycyrus and jonasbrother
Too many Twitter start-up. Enough already. We should all refuse to use anything that didn’t launch before December 2008.
We should stop using websites with god awful pseudo web 2.0 designs, but you won’t agree with that because your site falls into it. Seriously, who designed your site? It looks awful, consider having it redone by someone with an ounce of design skill.
Haha… agree!
Agreed
Agreed.
Looks really useful. Congratulations Adam and team!
well it do looks good and yup a very clever idea….I am requesting an invitation..lets see how ti works..
Looks nice
I’ll try one invitation.
Another cool Twitter tool!
Congrats Adam and team on the launch. Been playing with it for a day or two and love the media view. Great UI. Well done!
Congrats Adam. I’d like to try it out. Please invite me.
Congratulations!
Great program have to check it out!
FYI http://tunein.com is accepting beta invitation requests – we fixed a minor hiccup with the beta access flow so everything’s now running smoothly. We look forward to having you as TuneIn users and look forward to your feedback on how we can make the service even better!
Becoming more active user of Twitter and researching ways to save time from searching back & forth, plus scrolling through tweets. This look like it may be an app that will save time and be more involved.
Cool idea… looks great.
just got a tweet from tunein.com that my channel is ready and checked it out. bummer! all i get for media so far is a list of articles (screenshots of linked pages). maybe it will be cooler when videos show up. but wtf is up with ‘media’ consisting of articles, videos, and photos but NO MUSIC? hook up with hypem.com already.
Just use the troynt greasemonkey script and you can embed links (eg. images and videos) directly into twitter.com.