Twitter News

IPO Nears, and Hires Vivian Schiller to Head Twitter News

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.