Digital Tool Tuesday: Twitter's greased 'Lightning'

Twitter and Apple are hiring journalists to create their own brand of news. And now, Twitter’s Project Lightning includes a plan for followers to keep track of live events, through curated tweets. Buzzfeed sat down with Twitter developers about the project.

 “On Twitter’s mobile app, there will be a new button in the center of the home row. Press it and you’ll be taken to a screen that will show various events taking place that people are tweeting about.”

What does that mean for you? If you are live tweeting the Oscars red carpet or the Emmys, will your tweets be included for larger consumption, or lost in the curation to larger outlets? The new curation will instantly load videos and have rich image content; and it will be easier to embed tweets across all Web platforms. That could be a great advantage for breaking news events.

From Buzzfeed: “A team of editors… will select what it thinks are the best and most relevant tweets and package them into a collection.

These collections are designed to take advantage of images and videos associated with a particular event, and to bring them to life. None of that media is presented in the standard Twitter timeline — each tweet, picture, or video will take up the entire screen of your phone. You’ll view them one at a time by swiping. Importantly, collections will include — and thus promote — not only pictures and videos posted to Twitter, but Vines and Periscope videos as well.”

Your tweets might, however, be seen by folks other than your followers. That could serve as an advantage when your local breaking news (or features) event is picked up nationally.And tweets on an event can be embedded on other websites, which would allow you to build onto coverage of a live event. This is similar to Cover It Live or Storify (although Storify is hand-curated).

From Buzzfeed: “If they are embedded off-site, the events will continue to update as more curated tweets are added.”