People who hang out on Twitter a lot know that quite often big news breaks there first. A recent example - when Chinese hackers took down SportsNetwork, the news was on Twitter well before we covered it.

But so far, unless you’re lucky enough to be following the right people, and online when the news breaks, you aren’t going to necessarily see the breaking news. Services like TwitLinks have launched recently that utterly failed to solve the problem, despite excitement from bloggers.

Other services, like TweetMeme and Quotably, are useful for tracking Twitter messages themselves. But the key is finding the useful links - Twitter messages are really too short to have much news value for the most part. And figuring out if two Twitter messages are actually related is very difficult, so the matching doesn’t work very well.

Today, though, Orli Yakuel pointed me to Twitturly, a service that holds some promise. It aggregates URLs linked in Twitter messages and puts them on the home page based on overall popularity, calculated simply by determining the number of times the URL was in a Twitter message. Like TechMeme, the more people who link to an item the higher it appears. As time goes on, the story deteriorates and drops in the rankings.

The result is a page of very fresh and interesting links that users can go to and see the most popular current URLs being linked to.

Of course what’s beautiful today is spam hell tomorrow. If this gets any traction (and I believe it will), it will have the same problems that Digg saw with people creating multiple accounts and linking to stuff just to bump up the votes. There are ways of dealing with this, such as giving more weight to Twitter accounts with a lot of followers, but it will be a constant battle against the bad guys.

Some of the results are also a bit questionable. One of the current headlines, for example, is to Twitter.com/login, which isn’t new or useful. My recommendation would be for the service to track URLs and only show “headlines” pointing to new stuff that hasn’t been shown in the service before.

We’ll see how it evolves. But for now, it’s a place to check out what’s interesting right now, according to the Twitter universe.

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It’s clear that Twitter is the place that a lot of news breaks first (example), hours before blogs and days before mainstream media. No one has created an application yet that harvests that information and presents it as breaking news or breaking memes with anything like what TechMeme has done for blogs and other news sites.

The newest entrant is TwitLinks, which RWW calls the TechMeme of Twitter. It sounds exciting, but the site is nothing more than a list of links provided by top Twitter users. I’m one of the users they track, so I’ve taken the opportunity to spam the site. It was way too easy, as shown in the image above.

A single user’s gesture is not enough information for a service to call it interesting. Other users have to show their agreement by talking about it or linking to it. The aggregate linking patterns presented by AlphaTwitter, for example, is way more interesting than the data presented by TwitLinks.

Other sites are trying to organize Twitter information as well, including Quotably and Tweetmeme. They don’t appear to be the answer, either. Quotably tracks usage on a per user basis. TweetMeme’s rules are more behind the scenes, but the results are less than stellar.

There’s a terrific opportunity here for someone to mine this data and become a valuable destination site. But no one has done it yet. I anxiously await its arrival.

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A new service called Quotably may be the best third party Twitter-related service so far. That’s because it reformats Twitter messages into threaded conversations, making it significantly easier to follow actual discussions that are occurring on Twitter.

Until now, it’s been hard to follow conversations, even if you are in the middle of them. Sometimes responses come back tagged with your user name (@username), but often they don’t. And if you are just observing the conversation it is nearly impossible to see all of the responses.

The service is easy enough to use - just tell it a Twitter ID and it will show you threaded conversations that involve that person. You can also view a RSS feed for any Twitter user by simply adding “.rss” to the end of the Quotably URL, such as quotably.com/techcrunch.rss.

I found this via HackerNews, my new favorite news site. In a comment, the creator, Ben Tucker of Green River, says it was just a weekend project.

I have one feature request - permanent Quotably URLs for each threaded conversation, allowing people to link directly to it.

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