New Twitter Completes Its Transformation into News Source
The announcement yesterday of a new site for Twitter.com has the tech-savvy world clamoring to find out when they'll be eligible for the upgrade that includes a second panel of information for video an images. I don't know when Twitter will start rolling out access to the new site but from my experience with the recently upgraded iPad app, I think I have good sense of what it will be like: fantastic.
The new twitter is a rare instance of a company seizing the innovations others have made from their service and leapfrogging back into the center of the action. For those who have been following the history of Twitter, a company that has seemed more useful than potentially profitable, yesterday's announcement of Twitter's renovation wasn't fully expected.
Yes, the company telegraphed its intentions to include video and pictures in the stream as far back as the South by Southwest festival in Austin last winter. But most of Twitter's innovation as it evolved from SMS technology into a web-based, then app-based, often Facebook-linked service has come from others using Twitter in clever, unexpected ways. There was no reason to suspect that the addition of video and images would be anything more than an accommodation to all the third-party fellow travelers who had helped expand the popularity and usability of the service.
Unexpectedly on the last day of August, Twitter shift its authentication making an optional authentication method for third-party apps required. All across the internet, app makers and plug-in providers scrambled to patch their code. Whatever the reason for the change, it did signal that change was indeed coming.
About the same time, Twitter pushed out an iPad app was the clear product of a detailed analysis of the best features of the leading Twitter apps. That iPad app, at least from the images on the video announcing the new Twitter site, seems to incorporate many of the new multi-pane features. (My colleague Damon Brown makes a similar point.)
The funny thing about Twitter is how everyone seems to be on twitter but no one -- until now -- seems to have been using Twitter itself. According to Twitstat, 13.88% of Twitter users access the service through the web. Tweetdeck, Foursquare, Hootsuite, Echonfon and Tweetie for Mac account for more than 28% of Twitter use combined. There are dozens more. And that doesn't even take into account the huge number of people who read and see tweets as Facebook status updates.
For a long time, Twitter seemed more than happy to have everyone at the party. But one suspects the pressures of generating revenue, especially ad revenue, and desire to reset the service as a full-on news dissemination system caused Twitter to try to take back the middle ground of its own ecosystem.
Twitter's iPad app -- and, by inference, the new website -- turns the Twitter stream into an underground river of information. By clicking on tweet's embedded link, a new panel slides out to display the web page. On the new site, that will also launch a window for a video player or a picture.
When the tweet doesn't have a link, the sliding panel displays information about the tweeter in a little Obento box of nested access points to the tweeter's followers, favorites and tweets.
On the iPad, reading your Twitter feed has a tactile quality like riffling the pages of a book or magazine. This suggests the enormous potential for Twitter as a news source. As long as news organizations pump out their liveliest information for free, the Twitter feed will become a rich mass to sort through. The sliding panes on the iPad app facilitate flipping from story to story. It's the best digital approximation of reading on paper. Except with Twitter, you get all the papers at once.
The iPad app also allows the reader to Tweet, Re-Tweet, email, export and save to read later. It makes Twitter an interactive social reading tool. Trusted sources can annotate and vouchsafe the good stuff. For the first time, you're reading together in real time -- or not, if that works better for you.
Even more than the web, Twitter flattens and jumbles the source of news bringing the quality of the information and analysis to the fore. That's good for the writers and readers of the news but not necessarily the enterprises that produce it.
Adding video and images threatens to do the same to television, especially cable TV which has increasingly sought greater exposure by making its video available as what one can only assume will be tweetable snippets.
In this sense, the new Twitter site threatens to do undermine the value of cable news in the same way that the Google undermined newspapers. Video will get much greater exposure through the feed but the networks will lose ad revenue to Twitter. Expect to see the same kind of hand-wringing that pre-occupied newspapers last year at the CNBC and CNN next year.
It's not all detrimental news. Just as blogs emerged as an important news and information platform because of the web, the new Twitter has the potential to give anyone with the ambition, energy and talent to generate a large twitter following to also being to produce video that can be delivered by the massive and efficient medium. You Tube created the idea of viral video. The new Twitter will super-charge that concept.
Will all of this come to pass? Maybe not. But in trying to remake Twitter to regain some control over their own creation, the folks behind Twitter have completed its transformation from a social network into a full-fledged, and entirely new, form of media.