More news uses of Twitter
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 29 March 2007 at 15:11
Tags: Blogs, Flickr, Journalism, Mobile Phones, YouTube
I have been keeping an eye out for interesting journalistic applications of Twitter. So far it has mainly been RSS mashups that send headlines and a web link to the service, which sends 140-character messages to mobile phones or instant messager applications.
Now that Mario Menti — the developer behind the BBC-to-Twitter mashup — has created a tool that creates RSS-to-Twitter services on the fly, we can expect many more news sites to have Twitter feeds created for them.
There just isn’t very much more you can do in 140 characters.
Unless, of course, you’re trying to present live coverage of a long, drawn-out sporting event in a sport where the action can be neatly summarised in a statistical shorthand understood by the sport’s fans.
As it happens, one such a sport is currently having a rather important competition, and Manoj Kumar is trying to run just such a service. You can subscribe to his over-by-over Cricket World Cup news service by adding the Twitter user CricTimes as a friend.
Even someone like me, who fails to understand cricket, can see that this is a wonderful journalistic application of the service. Those who want live over-by-over coverage over the course of a match, but don’t have time to log onto a web sit will love this service. Just don’t ask about the short-term business case.
It’s worth remembering at this point that editors originally scoffed at over-by-over blogging of cricket matches when the Guardian first tried it a few years ago. It proved hugely popular, of course, because of the community discussion aspect of blogging — and has become a staple of test match coverage. So much so, in fact, that the ICC have been trying to prevent it.
Of course, none of this will convince committed Twitter-haters — like my former editor, Ian Reeves.
Ian today suggests, over on his great new video-blog, that my claims about the service’s potential utility took at hit at the British Press Awards.
Utter rubbish, of course. While it’s true that the lack of wifi and mobile phone reception deep in Grosvenor House was a bit of a headache on Monday night, but I had no difficulty blogging from a room just outside the event.
The blog sent automatic alerts to Twitter, so the handful of people who subscribed to the Twitter service were the first people outside the room to know the identities of the winners.
Ian also links to an image from a Wired blog post that mocks the use of Twitter, by pointing out all the silly things people use it for. The image points out how two other popular social media sites — Blogger, Flickr and YouTube — all faced similar criticisms about the banality of most of their content shortly after being launched.
Of course it’s true that even some journalists have been known to blog and Twitter occasionally about their cats’ antics. But all those tools have also became known for the the nuggets of useful and interesting stuff that they made accessible to the world — despite all the user-generated rubbish they predominantly grace the world with.
Beyond pictures of pet cats, Flickr later became known as one of the first places that images of the 7 July bombings appeared. Beyond the ever-present and ever-banal cat-blogging it also facilitates, Blogger also some of the best material the genre has to offer — the expert crogs. Both sites include aspects of social media that are most interesting to journalists. And YouTube, well… er…
If Twitter’s history ends up mirror that of Blogger, Flickr, or YouTube, I’m sure its creators Obvious will be very pleased indeed. Where do I buy shares?
Tags: Blogs, Flickr, Journalism, Mobile Phones, YouTube
