More, more, give me more!
I first chanced upon the use of Twitter by news agencies via a
blogpost by Jeff Utecht who questioned what its implications might be on society.
Utecht linked to the Associated Press
Twitter page. From there it was only a short step, and some educated guesses,
to find similar pages for the BBC, the New York Times, CNN and Reuters. I have
no doubt that there are more, and in addition, these services offer more specific
feeds - technology, sports, world or national affairs. It's a good guess that
any RSS feeds that these news sources offer are also available via Twitter.
A review of these Twitter pages, however, suggests that they're hardly more up-to-the-minute
than whatever is being posted on the web sites of these news agencies, or in their
RSS feeds (which of course refer to the articles on the web sites). If I'm lucky
I'll find an item posted in the last 15 minutes, but previous items are at least
a few hours old. I doubt that this delivery system actually speeds up the process
of disseminating the news. Rather than doing this, what it does do is make the
news readily available to people who are continually online. When I checked, these
services had between 1500 to 6000 subscribers. I doubt that the difference was
due to the quality of the information they distribute, but was instead simply a
function of personal preference. News junkies among the constantly connected can
certainly benefit from a service such as this, but they're hardly
getting news faster than people who are tuned to their radios.
Go to: Actually, I could have waited.