Metropol

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.

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.

Sput wrote: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.

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.

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.

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

CNN wrote: 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.