This is my take on Twitter as a source of news and how different could it be when compared to other sources of news in the present social media. I won't get too technical and as usual this is the perspective of an everyday avid user.
So of late there is this explosion of social media, applications and devices which specialize in bringing specific personalized news to the reader's (consumer) door step, instead of the traditional method of consumers reaching out and picking information that interests them the most, from a plethora of junk. Those were the days of the good old newspapers.
Times been changing and I have always been an ardent newspaper reader. Somehow I haven't been able to adopt properly and feel comfortable with the explosion of e-papers ad e-news. Plus the idea of traditional network news is too time consuming and too specific in terms of the news. All of that, along with the teenage-youth excitement and perpetual laziness have pushed me away from news for a while. Somehow it seemed all fine to be away from news, lesser things to worry about, plus I always kept track of things that I wanted to, anyways. With the lots of free time on hand social sites like Facebook, Myspace, Orkut and YouTube, made way into my browsing time. Ironically, I also stumbled upon twitter in this process.
I had my concerns before adopting to Twitter. But a series of incidents led to my first #helloworld tweet on twitter. It was surprisingly easy to use and the rest as they say is history.
In Twitter I found a social website, which lets you follow the tweeple( people on twitter) that you would like to follow and only them. This way you get to see only specific information that you would like to, right on your computer. The pain of going through news websites to search for news that interests you could be eliminated. This gave me a new hope for reviving my interest in news once again. Sure there have been devices which pushed specific news to your computer before, with the RSS feeds, etc, but I was attracted to Twitter because of its social interactivity and social presence.
Other news devices for example 'Google Reader' serve a similar purpose too, when it comes to pushing specific news to users. Add to that the power of google i.e the information they collect about users and their powerful search capabilities - we indeed have a device which potentially could wreck some major media houses. But that hasn't happened yet and why? if you wonder!!
I guess Google Reader lacks in a few areas. I have been using it off late and one thing that I don't quite like about it is, its inability to share information with my friends on facebook/twitter. For now, I guess we can safely say that the power of friends & followers in Facebook(FB) and Twitter can't be challenged. Other social websites like YouTube and news websites have accepted that and are harnessing this feature for their own good. It is surprising to see Google Reader not adapt the same. It allows you to share the information to your 'Google profile' or 'followers' on Google, which is minuscule in terms of the power of twitter or FB. I am feeling handicapped at not being able to share it with the people I know, who all have established profiles on either FB or twitter. So why should I change base to Google Reader ?
Sure Google Reader's selling points would be its excellent recommendations in terms of 'news you might like' ( thanks to powers of google) and of course the power of 'google news' itself. But I did a small check on most of the sources of information on google reader and found almost all of them having a twitter profile and who tweet at the same pace as information that appears on google reader. Add to that the powers of Twitter in being able to reach out to the audience and a big user database, I see no reason in changing base to google reader. Of course I will continue using google reader to get updates on the new blog posts of my friends who i subscribed to on 'blogspot', but is that the extent of google reader ?
Twitter might not have the data that google has, of users- so the recommendations are missing, but all it takes for someone like me, would be to use the 'recommendations' provided by Google Reader, and follow the tweets of those recommendations on Twitter. There, with that simple step the power of 'recommendations' provided by Google Reader, just became redundant. With the new additions of 'Retweets' & 'lists', Twitter has become a stronger source of spreading and accessing news. Lists are able to eliminate the deluge of information on Twitter. They are doing a great job in segregating useful information from random information. They are doing the same thing like what 'feed bundles' in Google Reader do. Almost all the major media houses have 'list bundles' now for the ease of 'news-push' on Twitter now.
Next with real-time updates of Twitter almost any netizen or a phone user can become a news reporter and push news real time from any corner of the world. That's another power of Twitter where as Google Reader does not have any such features. With the latest 'real-time search' introduced by Google, they have started collecting the real-time data from twitter users, thus recognizing Twitter as a very good source of real-time news.
The trends on Google Reader have already been challenged by the 'trending topics' on Twitter. The re-tweets on Twitter definitely are stronger than the sharing feature on Google Reader, thanks to the user database of Twitter.
The idea of using a simple hashtag (#), to reach out to almost the entire audience on twitter is overwhelming, where as on Google Reader I just feel like a single aloof entity in this whole wide global village. Unless Google Reader adopts the power of friends on twitter and Facebook, it might be a great potential resource not properly utilized. The 'Social search' on 'Google labs' has already been trying to harness the connectivity between users provided by twitter and facebook.
Also the feature of Google Reader in showing unread posts over the last few days is 'annoying' to sat the least. I don't like the idea of opening Google Reader after a week to see '1000' unread posts. Sure all it takes for me to do is 'mark as read', but well Twitter does not do that.. So...
Looking forward to a more technical comparison of Twitter and Google Reader by people working on Social Media like a friend of mine 'Munmun'.
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