Who is the Metropol Twitter Updater?

[Sput]

That's pretty interesting. I imagine you get lousy information from a single twitter feed but enough twitter feeds involved that your signal to noise, so to speak, clears up pretty fast.

[cdd]

Strangely, I was just thinking bout this yesterday when Gmail died. Of course, it's only useful if you know what to search for in the first place - you cant find out 'brand new' news using twitter which is a shame.

[marksi]

That's pretty interesting. I imagine you get lousy information from a single twitter feed but enough twitter feeds involved that your signal to noise, so to speak, clears up pretty fast.

I had a picture of the crashed plane on my pc at least 10 minutes before I saw a similar one on CNN (which appeared to be ahead of BBC News and Sky News by a few minutes in itself). The fact that it had broken into 3 pieces was also on Twitter before AP, PA or Reuters flashed it.

As to what to search for, I just searched for Schiphol. Within Twitter itself other people will quickly identify someone at the scene if you haven't found them yourself and they'll then re-tweet or link to that person. The rubbish is pretty quickly filtered out.

[Sput]

So there could be money to be made if they employed the right analytical approach to find fast-moving trends. If people keep using it then it could become an incredibly useful "omg look at this" news aggregator/instant focus group sort of thing.

[marksi]

It's just an evolution of what already exists - while for years now most mobiles have a camera, if you are at the scene of something interesting really all you could do was to send that pic to a friend. How many people have the number of a news channel/agency in their phone?

Now you can Twitpic an interesting photo and some text direct from your mobile and it is accessible to the world in seconds. I bet it's raising some interesting copyright questions in newsrooms though.

http://search.twitter.com/ auto-updates with the most common search terms. The search results page will also auto-update every few seconds showing if how many new tweets with your search terms in have been sent.

[Sput]

I strongly get the impression that the media doesn't understand what Twitter is yet:

The social networking site Twitter again stole a march on traditional media when it was the first outlet to publish dramatic pictures of the Turkish Airlines crash.

Unless it's for brevity, they don't seem able to distinguish between a website and its users. Twitter doesn't publish things, its users post them.