More and more people are relying on Twitter as their source of new and interesting links. It makes sense, it’s using a social graph to curate your news. And depending on who you follow, it can be a very useful filter. A new site, The Twitter Times, takes that idea and puts it in an easy-to-digest newspaper-style form.
Basically, The Twitter Times looks at all the people you follow on Twitter, finds their tweets with links in them, and creates a custom newspaper for you based on those links. But it’s not just a straight stream of stories based on how recent they are, instead the service looks at how many people have linked to the article, both in your social circle and outside of it.
The Twitter Times is broken up into two columns, a “What’s Hot” section and a “Top News History” section. As you might imagine, the main “What’s Hot” column features more time sensitive stuff, while Top News History is the bigger stories that people keep linking to.
If you see an article you want to read on The Twitter Times, you can simply click the “show all text” button and the article will expand in line on the page. You can also obviously click on the headline to read the full story on its original site. There is also a retweet button for every article, as well as a collapsed list of who tweeted it.
The Twitter Times says it updates these links on an hourly basis, but the main idea is to be a digest for these links so you don’t have to constantly be monitoring your stream for new and interesting links. It’s a similar concept to the popular Tweetmeme, but obviously the curation by your social graph is key here. In that regard, it’s much more like the recently launched TweetMixx, but the newspaper-style visual layout could potentially be more interesting to some.
Looking over The Twitter Times, it does seem like a pretty compelling way to digest news. But there is some room for improvement. For example, it would be nice if the service filtered out links that you have already tweeted out (and presumably already have read) yourself, as Kevin Marks noted.
To get your own Twitter Times, simply visit the site and enter your Twitter name. It will take a while to populate your news, but they’ll tweet it out when it’s ready. Find out more about it in the video below.
Love the LiT reference
The concept looks pretty good. Making a newspaper out of Twitter – but what if the main source (Twitter) shows fail whale…?
Twitter is being used for so many things these days. HR personnel use it to do BG checks for a new candidate… and the case of Cisco fatty is happening somewhere every now and then…
Read this http://www.dotc...tweet-for-a-job
But I wonder how much does our tweets reveal what sort of person we are…
These guys have the right idea actually.
Cool idea, but I bet they’re going to have to change their name. No way Twitter is going to let them keep Twitter in their name as we have been seeing a lot lately.
Agreed. I am actually surprised the the owner of the site neglected to heed Twitter’s squatting rules related to its business. However, I can certainly see how this would only gain the site more publicity as they vocally take the argument of fair use.
Wow, this is exactly what i need. I often end up coming through the last 100 replies for the most up to date news and always wished there was a simple way to comb out the “my cat took a dump in the shape of a donut” tweets.
I hope they have a service that promotes users who are followed or have a high rating or something. its hard to find consistent people on twitter.
I predict a name change within the next few months, probably sooner. Twitter has publicly said they do not want companies to use “Twitter” in their name.
http://www.cnbc...com/id/32889193
I’d like to see this done for facebook as well.
+1
you cannot read other people home timeline via API
MG, thank you for the post. Thanks everyone who subscribed but we’ve got too many requests to handle at the moment.
Twitter buys them in 6 months or someone else does.
Awesome Idea
This dog will hunt.
Great idea… I just signed up and can’t wait to play.
Hi MG,
When you say “It’s a similar concept to the popular Tweetmeme, but obviously the curation by your social graph is key here.” you are describing Microplaza
We wanted to go a step further and instead of being just another link/memetracker we provided a new layer by tracking and ranking the links from your personal timeline (apart from other feats such as ‘being someone’ -actually what Twittertim.es does-, ‘tribes’, and forthcoming plugins and widgets).
Anyway, this proves a) there’s a need to filter Twitter chaos b) there’s plenty of room to tap Twitter as a news source c) we’re thus on the right track.
However it’s kind of surprising that this service gets compared to Tweetmeme when Tweetmeme doesn’t do that. As a matter of fact, check TwitterTim.es and compare it to our motto: Any resemblance?
In any case, thanks for the post,
Regards,
Elena Benito-Ruiz
Microplaza Product Manager,
Also at http://twitter.com/elenabrz
PS: (btw, I agree with Joel Strellner: Twitter made it very clear about the name issue).
I would definitely like to try this, but the site seems to be overloaded.
However, I am already impressed with the idea. It’s cool, and no doubt that any similar solution will be in demand, as it helps people to satisfy one of very important necessities – necessity in analyzing, sequencing and filtering information. The world quickly changes nowadays, and amount of information grows exponentially. It becomes more and more difficult to orientate in this endless ocean of information. And this is a very serious challenge for individuals and communities. How will we accept this challenge? I hope more and more customizable, flexible and easy-to-use solutions will arrive. Otherwise, people risk losing way and even wits.