Twitter Social News Mashup that Kicks Facebook’s Ass
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
- find them
- sort them
- 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.
Very nice article. Thanks for sharing the links.
There were a few not present in Twitdom – The Twitter Applications Database.
I’ll be adding it to the database shortly.
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Thank you for turning me on to these new tools. I was not aware of them. Oh the fun I will have today with this new research.
I just barely started really getting into twitter, and am just now seeing how many uses it has, a great idea to make a whole mashup site out of people tweets! “Breaking News” on digg is 8 hours old lol
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Nice article. Looks like Twitter’s really making some headway. Thanks and look forward to reading more!
I didn’t know about these sites. I will immediately see what they’re all about. Why do they have to be related to Twitter in the way they are named?
I just started using twitter a few days ago on our company blog, how does twitter enhance your SEO?
Twitter can be used to engage the customer and to build brand loyalty.
More a communication tool than a selling tool.
Typically twitter users won’t buy stuff if they land on your pages via a link.
It’s nice to see that all 6 sites mentioned are still alive and well, one year later. I love the traffic I get from these resources, but wonder what value I get from having all their linkbacks in my comments section. Topsy, in particular, sends a link for each comment, so it can get pretty long, and I’m not sure people really read them. On the other hand, it does add a bit of credibility to the thought “wow, other people like this, too” which probably helps in readership retention.
Hi, Awesome post about Twitter. I think Twitter is going to be one of the stronger networks because of the fact that it is supported by so many industries. I also think when Twitter introduces some of it’s new functions, returning traffic will increase to show the real growth of the network. Keep up the great work!
I hadn’t been aware of a twitter mash up before i read this article, the twitter times is a great tool.
Hey Victoria, there is even a better mashup mimicking a Twitter newspaper by now. It’s http://paper.li/
I may add it to the list in the future.
Didn’t know, now I know. Thanks