TweetWire turns Twitter into a newspaper

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

TweetWire turns Twitter into a newspaper

by Brad Linder May 12th 2008

Twitter may have started off as a micro-blogging tool that asked users "what are you doing" right now? But the service has grown into a complex communications platform. Some people use Twitter to keep in touch with a few friends, while others use it take part in wider discussions taking place throughout the blogosphere. Still others use it as a sort of micro-broadcast medium, sending out updates, but rarely responding to messages posted by others. One thing is clear though: People post a lot of links to interesting articles on Twitter.

TweetWire attempts to take some of the most interesting links and organize them in a newspaper style web page. Tweets are broken up into a handful of categories, including elections, technology, sports, and celebrities. And the links are collected using a combination of the Twitter search engine TweetScan and the Yahoo! Pipes RSS remixing utility.

The results are... mixed. On the one hand, we love the idea of finding some of the best links from Twitter laid out on a simple web page. This way you don't have to sift through page after page of messages from your contacts to find out what people are talking about. But TweetWire isn't going to replace your daily newspaper anytime soon. On the one hand, all the links were at least interesting enough for someone to post them online. On the other hand, a lot of the day's top stories might never make it to TweetWire simply because nobody bothered to tweet about them.

If you're only interested in tech news, you might want to check out TwitLinks, which compiles tweets from a handful of influential technology bloggers.

[via Killer Startups]

Tags: news, newspaper, tweet-this, tweetwire, twitter

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