I just saw three twitter posts in a row about Tiger Woods and the phrase “The Future of News” sprang to mind. I think I first heard the phrase in John Borthwick’s essay with that title, but there have been several times since I’ve started using twitter that I’ve seen this phenomenon in action.
It happened twice this weekend: just now regarding Tiger and earlier regarding Tim Russert. It’s interesting how much seeing the same topic repeated 2-3 times in a row makes you notice it and pay attention.
Idea for a twitter app: use some linguistics tools to parse incoming tweets from my friends into phrases, people, events, and places. Group tweets by theme, showing me hot themes, and bubble up stuff I should care about because lots of my friends are talking about it. Since I only have a small group of people I’m following, I don’t require this filtered view, but I can imagine how it would be quite useful if I had a huge group I was following on twitter. Perhaps more useful to me would be something that consumes all content published by all my friends (twitter, facebook, blogs, tumblogs, etc) and creates a nice filter view on that.
