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Twitter, FriendFeed and the news

Like many other news organizations, we’ve been experimenting with Twitter for publishing breaking news and other information in short bites. It’s been interesting to see how our reporters and editors react to it, as well as the interaction with our meager number of “followers.” Even those in our newsroom who admittedly don’t quite “get it,” the exercise of publishing a new way has been healthy and for that I encourage all news organizations to being dabbling.

Steve Rubel pointed out the potential of FriendFeed today, which takes the content stream concept to a whole new level. I’ve been meaning to check out FriendFeed for a while, but it took Steve’s blog to get to go sign up. Rubel writes:

People are increasingly turning to their peers for news, information and recommendations. And Friendfeed is more than an aggregation site or a community that’s layered on top of others. It’s a recommendation engine that surfaces content (both pro and amateur) via your peers - and that’s huge. Sure there are things wrong with it, but I believe Friendfeed is incredibly disruptive. It’s the next big thing online for consumers. It may even become the next Google.

So while we can’t see where all this is going or how it will affect news consumption, it’s important for news publishers to be involved in the exploration and experimentation, not just waiting on the sidelines for the early adopters to figure it all out.

Posted by MarkBriggs on Tuesday, June 10, 2008
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