Right Now: A Twitter/News Mash-up
Many people will turn to Twitter to break and discuss news. However, I feel as-if Twitter, on its own, is not a great medium for distributing and discovering news and events. Although there exists a ‘Popular Topics’ feature, there is no obvious attempt to actually connect with the news and events; rather, there is just short, vague and duplicated statements, lacking the editorial quality we are accustomed to from respected news providers.
In an attempt to resolve this issue, I have been working on a little project to connect Twitter with news. Right Now (http://RightNowFeed.org) is a simple web-service combining data from Twitter and News sites, such as the BBC, CNN and Reuters. While news sites provide the quality coverage, tweets from Twitter are used to rank the items’ relevancy. It is designed to replace any news feed you currently have.
In all, it took less than a week for this project to come from idea to launch. Please give it a go, and tell me what you think — Right Now is a long way from perfect, and you opinion and suggestions will help in getting there.
-Brendon.
