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.

Twitter has started a new, real-time late-breaking news service called @EventParrot.

@EventParrot uses direct messages (which are personalized messages direct to a user) to send late-breaking news alerts.  Twitter itself, overall, is a news service -  but there is a great volume of messages.  @EventParrot is a form of 'Curation' where only the most important news is sent out.

@EventParrot is part of a series of new kinds of 'notification' services by Twitter.  It would seem that we can expect more of these kind of services in the future.  Curation in general is an important way to add value, and will be increasingly important in any medium when there is a lot of volume.

These new kinds of notification services are a great way to draw new users to Twitter, and to prod the least-active users of Twitter to use it more often.

Any new news-notification service is of interest to us at LateBreakingNews.com  We will be following @EventParrot and similar services closely.  We are also very interested to see how the AP Newswire will respond in general to the speed of Twitter, and to curated services like @EventParrot in particular. 

Our site, LateBreakingNews.com, is part of the Arkacia Ventures network.