NewsMix Gives Twitter News Tweets Validation Among Traditional News
![newsmix](https://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/newsmix.png)
There are lots of different ways to utilize the power of Twitter. Many people use it simply at its most basic level, posting tweets to their followers while scanning those of their friends. Others use the service to advertise their business and spend hours identifying the best ways to market their products through the website. Still others choose to use Twitter as their main source of news, subscribing to channels that they feel will provide them with the best news available through nontraditional means.
Those in the latter group have found their numbers growing rapidly through the past several months. Revolutions in the Arab world have driven many people to use Twitter as a primary news outlet, reading about current events that they do not feel are adequately covered by mainstream media directly from the source.
Unfortunately, those using Twitter do not always receive as much content from their stories as they might like. While they get great tidbits of news from here and there, everything they receive is in punctuated messages of only a few measly characters. News requires details and rich analysis. For those who really want to know what is going on in their worlds, unless a link is present to a real news story, tweets paint an incomplete picture.
While in the past people may have been forced to be content with such incomplete information, today they simply do not have to be. Thanks to a new web-based service called NewsMix you can combine Twitter and social networking news feeds with full-blown news articles.
The program acts much on the premise of many other news aggregators. You choose topics that you would like to receive news on and NewsMix puts those on your page. This particular service, however, allows you to mix Twitter feeds into your mainstream news sites, combining the brief news blurbs direct from where the action is happening with professional commentary from news agencies.
You can visit the service’s page here where you can set up an account and link it straight to your Twitter account. Choose feeds that you would like to be included on your front page and then see it populate not only with content from major news producers but also from any Twitter feeds that you choose to include.
NewsMix considers your new page to be a unique magazine of content. Each account can be custom tailored to feature news stories and feeds that some other people might find interesting as well. In light of this, the service allows other users to subscribe to your main news page so that, if you put together an interesting array of news services, users can follow your news. You can even create PDF versions of your front page – one of the services most unique features.
There are a lot of different news aggregators out there, and finding piles of news content is not difficult. What is hard, however, is tracking down a service that compliments traditional news with the Twitter feeds that you actually want to hear about. NewsMix meshes these two worlds together, and news junkies who follow both streams of content will likely find the service to be a welcome hybridisation of news sources.
Advertisement
It seems that personalizing news is a trend nowadays. I know another service like this, News360, http://www.news360app.com/ . It has mobile applications for major mobile platforms already, and desktop/web version is coming soon, they say.
This service is different from NewsMix – it concentrates on events and objects, not selected threads.
You pick up a category or create your custom category with some objects (a country, a city, a person, an organization are the objects), and get a selection of news, organized by ‘clusters’ (cluster is all messages about some news event). Application have Twitter tab, where you can read tweets relevant to that cluster if system found any, or tweet yourself. Also there are Facebook, ReadItLater, Instapaper and Email sharing available.
So, if you read on regular basis latest news about Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Cory Doctorow… any well-known entity – you can give this a try
Interesting, thanks for posting Roman