How do you get your news? In the past I have variously read newspapers, watched TV news bulletins, read news.bbc.co.uk and obviously more recently sites such as Digg. Now it seems I get most of my news from Twitter.
First of all there are the newsbots. These are RSS feeds pumped straight into Twitter. Most big news providers have them, my choice of news as mentioned before is the BBC so I subscribe to a selection of BBC topics from this list. As something gets posted I get a 140 character “tweet”.
Then there are the blogger Tweets. I don’t read TechCrunch now either on the web or in my RSS reader. There is no point when Duncan and co Tweet the big stuff.
It’s not just about using Twitter as an RSS reader either. The conversations change when anything big is happening. You pick up mentions and link drops pretty much as soon as the collective Twitter consciousness becomes aware. In fact as my subscription list of people I follow grows I am finding Twitter often scoops the places I would usually turn to, with the added benefit of all the opinion and analysis that follows.
Twitter started out as “what are you doing” but it has changed. Now it isn’t just about harmless breakfast ingredient blather, over-sharings and low grade flirting, there are some clever and interesting folk discussing intelligent topics too.
Is Twitter changing your news reading habits too?
