Twitter Social News Mashup that Kicks Facebook’s Ass

crowd

Wisdom of crowds has proven very useful in organizing the information overload of the Web. Sadly though the first wave of social news sites like Reddit are broken.

Also the ever popular Facebook rather spreads sensational but fake news from unreliable sources than the boring truth.

Twitter is a social site that has ongoing success in organizing news – when you know how to use it.

How that, isn’t Twitter just social networking and one to a few communications? No, Twitter is widely used for link sharing and spreading news. It’s hard though to

  1. find them
  2. sort them
  3. keep up with them.

Third party sites have sprung up that analyze Twitter wisdom of crowds to highlight the most popular news among your peers in or general.

Many of these social news mashups, interfaces or tools have already disappeared again but a few of them grow while others and even new ones appear.

My favorite is the “Twitter newspaper” Tweeted Times. It collects links tweeted by your friends and their friends. It also features popular “papers” from other – more prominent – sources.

Tweeted Times to the rescue
The Tweeted Times is the best social news mashup I’ve seen so far. It not only finds the most popular stories among a specific audience it also personalizes them.

You can view the stories linked by people a particular user follows. Just check mine to understand that process.

As mentioned above you can also check out the most linked stories from renowned sources like the NYT or widely known groups of people from certain areas of expertise.

In contrast highly biased social news sites like Facebook that are often pushing fake news because facts don’t sound spectacular enough.

Twitter is the number one place for social news by now.

You just have to know how to find the most popular news there. These tools are more than enough to achieve that.

Last updated November 29th, 2016. First published: January 19th, 2009.