Twitter will soon have its IPO.  Forecast for its valuation is in the $20B range.  Twitter has over 200 million users but has yet to find a way to monetize Twitter.

Twitter has hired Vivian Schiller, from NBC, to head its division on News Partnerships.   It was quite fitting when she tweeted, "Excited to join @Twitter as Head of News in January. Leaving @NBCNews at year's end. Grateful to my beloved colleagues for 2+ great years."  One of her roles is to be the Liaison between Twitter and news organizations.

Twitter has a news experiment running called @EventParrent, and that experiment and others expected show that Twitter wants to be a news broadcaster and not just a social network.

Another Twitter experiment is called Magic Recs; Magic Recs looks at people and popular tweets and reacts if they all tweet something similar, or if they all follow someone.  So its about detecting trends in groups.

Twitter is expected to add more local knowledge over time, so a breaking news service would include an option to have more local news in the stream.

It remains to be seen if the major news media will improve the reporting they do through Twitter or not.  On the one hand, the news media does not make enough use of Twitter and the feeds can be boring at times.  On the other hands, the news media does not want to see Twitter get too big; the last thing they will want is to be helping create a new competitor.

We have upgraded the search terms on the home page, that find tweets form the public about news.
 
If you spend some time on the home page you will get a feel for how the two news approaches differ.  The media stream, which combines many of the major news media into one stream, is factual, but not enough activity; its a little boring.  Tweets from the public, in the right hand column, are less focused but its more interesting - more frequent updates, more pictures, and some interesting comments.

We would like a method to do more 'Curation' on the public's tweets, to reduce the off-topic tweets.  We are seeking a Curation partner that has some experience in this area.   And on the left column, for the major news media sources, we would to also do some curation to remove duplicate entries - for when two different news organizations report the same news item (and in the same way).

Please Contact Us if you can help us Curate the results.

 
Right now we have most of the major news sources.  But if you notice one that you like, but we do not have it, then use our Contact Page and tell us about the news source you found.
 
We have ABC breaking news, CBS breaking news, Fox breaking news, and more. We also have weather alerts, tornado and other natural disaster alerts, and the AP breaking news alerts.

We are evaluating Al Jazeera and a few other international news sources.