In order to make its real-time news feed more user-friendly, Twitter will curate tweets on live events, says a report from BuzzFeed. Called Project Lightning, the changes will allow a user to follow events instead of just people, along with quickly uploading photos and videos across platforms.
Twitter also hiring editors
For this project, Twitter will hire a team of editors to curate the most attractive and relevant tweets relating to numerous live events. Curating the tweets will help in preventing users from getting bombarded with every single tweet.
Twitter’s strategy to hire a media team may have been inspired by a recent move from Apple, which is planning to develop a team of journalists to support its new Apple News service. Last week, a job ad from Apple, was looking for candidates with over five-years of “newsroom experience” to select breaking news from the popular publishers such as the Financial Times, The New York Times and The Guardian.
Facebook and Google are also working on similar plans. Facebook has a deal with nine publishers including the BBC and BuzzFeed to show “instant articles” in the news feed of users, thus doing away with the need of users to leave the platform.
Will it accelerate declining user growth?
For now, Twitter plans to curate around seven to ten events a day. But Costolo informs BuzzFeed News that going forward, the micro-blogging firm plans to open the tool up to other organizations. So that even a publication that focuses on a niche interest could create a collection for a niche demographic. The micro-blogging’s mobile app will provide information on both pre-scheduled events and breaking news events.
Terming the feature a “bold change, not evolutionary,” Twitter’s senior vice-president of product Kevin Weil told BuzzFeed that the new feature could help the company to tap users who check the site but do not log in and those who check tweets from other sites.
“There’s a beautiful connection to our strategy of reaching users on every platform,” he told BuzzFeed. “It’s not just logged-in Twitter, it’s logged-out, and it’s syndicated on other websites and mobile apps.”
The new feature will likely help in accelerating the user growth for Twitter, which has been visited by around a billion people, but has only 302 million users.
