Lately I have taken to subscribing to twitter feeds of news blogs (NYT bits and the like). I have also started using tweetdeck as my twitter client instead of the web based client I had been using thus far.
The combination got me thinking that tweetdeck would make for a great newspaper (newsreader) if only this client included a way to easily preview the links that the news sources include in their posts. What's more, to complete the online newspaper experience, tweetdeck could allow commenting back on the news story, right from the client. Finally, a way to bookmark the article could add the "newspaper clipping" experience - perhaps the bookmark itself would be saved to delicious or google bookmarks.
As I write this, I am thinking that such a newsreader must already exist given all the activity in the twitter ecosystem. Yet, scanning results for web searches does not reveal any twitter client that has such "newspaper" functionality. The closest think I can think of is using Google reader to aggregate all the different twitter feeds. Am I completely missing some amazing client out there that can turn twitter into a personal newspaper?
UPDATED (8/3/2010)
Flipboard seems to be doing something very similar - only for multiple sources including Twitter and on an iPad.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
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More on flipboard at http://www.businessweek.com/idg/2010-07-21/flipboard-for-ipad.html
ReplyDeleteI must confess I don't get it. This is exactly the set of problems addressed and solved by RSS/Atom and feed readers. E.g: using NetNewsWire for Mac you can subscribe to newspaper feeds, read previews, read the entire article, post to Delicious etc, save Clippings, so on and so forth, all in a much more structured manner than the free text used by Twitter. Various tech blogs have proclaimed the death of RSS at the hands of Twitter, and that might well be happening, but is it happening for legitimate reasons? (i.e., is Twitter really a better way to subscribe, preview and read news, over RSS readers).
ReplyDeleteWhile I agree with you that the reader problem was solved a while back, in the recent past, eyeballs have shifted/expanded to Twitter, Facebook and the like. In addition, Twitter's 140 character limit has popularized a different style of posting that begs "previews" and "inline expansion of the URLs". Finally, new device (iphone, ipad) allow a different mode of interaction than previously possible.
ReplyDeleteBottomline: there is a need for new readers to address the above. That doesn't mean that that these readers need to be reimplemented from scratch (although companies like Flipboard may be doing just that).
I agree with what you write in your comment above. Twitter has overtaken other modes of information dissemination. And good subscribe/manage/preview tools would be valuable add-ons. Ironically, perhaps because of the shift to mobile platforms, Twitter clients for the desktop are in fact falling behind (Tweetie for Mac 2.0 was claimed imminent back in ~ March 2010 and there's as yet no sight of it).
ReplyDeleteA couple interesting links which just do the "twitter newspaper" thing:
ReplyDeletehttp://twittertim.es/
http://paper.li/
[Reposted from comments on this thread elsehwere.]