Apple News was unveiled during the keynote at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, and it’s one of the new tentpole features baked into the incoming iOS 9, which is set to arrive later this year.
Much like Apple Music, Apple News will have its content curated by human beings, and that’s something that’s beginning to catch on at other companies, too. Facebook is one of them, with the social networking giant recently unveiling Instant Articles. Now, Twitter looks to be joining in on the fun as well.
According to a report published recently by BuzzFeed, Project Lightning is Twitter’s new focus on news curation, and it will be handled by human beings behind the scenes. With this project, news will now be shown in a more coherent fashion in one’s Timeline, giving them a new way to follow the news story that’s breaking (or just generally interesting), rather than follow a steady stream of Twitter users like normal, with some of them posting about the news a user wants to follow.The human curated content will not just include the tweets regarding the subject, but also news articles, photos, videos and more. What’s more, Project Lightning will allow for stories to be updated even after they’ve been shared, so that a steady stream of new content is always present.
One of the strongest elements of this new initiative from the social network is its reach, as Twitter aims to get it as widely available as possible. These stories will be available within the Twitter app, both for mobile and desktops, but also even when a user isn’t logged into the service. These stories will be easily shareable, too, which should make Twitter an even more powerful source within the news field moving forward.
“There’s a beautiful connection to our strategy of reaching users on every platform,” says Weil. “It’s not just logged-in Twitter, it’s logged-out, and it’s syndicated on other websites and mobile apps. This reaches all of them. The collections are a core part of our logged-in experience — that’s the point of being in the center tab. But you can easily imagine them as logged-out experiences telling about something happening now out in the world. And you can imagine them — and this is new — as collections and syndicating them across any website or mobile app.“As for when Project Lightning might get officially released, it’s unknown at this point. The project has been in the works for quite some time, and the report seems to indicate that there are “still months more left,” which could mean it might be some time before the project is ready for the public.Recently, Twitter made other big changes to its service, including the removal of the 140-character limit for Direct Messages, as well as autoplay support for GIFs, native videos and Vines within its Timeline.[via BuzzFeed]Like this post? Share it!
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