Those twits in the news
| Thursday, January 15th, 2009 | --Sean |
I recently read an article where a helpful financial pundit suggested that one of the best ways for Yahoo! to turn the corner under our new CEO would be to purchase Twitter. As one of those neanderthals who hasn't yet acclimated to broadcasting my status to the world every five minutes, I didn't quite understand the appeal, until I caught Vik Singh's ridiculously cool BOSS/Twitter mashup, TweetNews. As he explains in his blog, there's often a disconnect between what news is actually the most recent, and what news is actually the most recent that's also interesting -- if you're searching for news about Apple, for instance, the most recent article about music sales dropping 7% worldwide is mildly relevant, but you really care about the fact that Steve Jobs recently committed to a six-month leave of absence (comparing a Yahoo! News search sorted by date vs. the top result from TweetNews). Leveraging the immediacy of Twitter on top of relevant search results is a fantastic way to filter down to the news that really matters right now, or at least is really trendy to put up as a status message.
(TechCrunch thinks that it's cool, too, which is why it kept dying under heavy traffic)