Over the past few months, social media has got a head start for promptness over media networks on several occasions. All thanks to the large Facebook and Twitter community, it would only just take less than 30 seconds for people at the scene of the recent Jakarta bombings to break the news and almost instantly, it has become one of the top trending topics. However, I pity the journalists working for CNN or New York Times. The traditional media would have to take at least a lengthy 30 minutes to broadcast the news. By then, millions of people on these social networking platforms were already discussing the issue. In today’s world, what we want is real-time responsiveness and Twitter got to be the most suitable choice as it’s the epicenter of world events. This has played a part in Twitter’s exponential growth.
Let’s say you prefer the traditional media but would love to keep up with the social media trend. This is when The Summarizer comes in really handy. It’s a mashup of both Evri and Twitter and currently in Alpha. Evri is a platform which searches the World Wide Web and gather content from as many highly regarded information sources as the system can find, turn them into profile pages on people, places, books, movies, companies, events, organizations, teams, products – all kinds of stuff.
The Summarizer shortens the gap between traditional media and the real-time web, and connect the information found there until a net of knowledge has been woven. It semantically connects the real-time web and traditional media to one another with their common threads, entities and topics. Mainly for those who want to search the hottest topics on the world wide web, users can find the latest and popular news in a neat, fun and elegant way. By grabbing data from thousands of sources, it displays the most recent tweets, articles, images and even videos all in one place. In short, it functions just like a combination of both Twitter and Google News. Besides doing a #topic search, you can also work on a @user search to find out what a particular Twitterer is tweeting about.
If you aren’t a tech-savvy person or not interested in tech stuff, most probably you weren’t like The Summarizer. Why? Most of the hottest topics listed on its front page are related to technology because the site grabs the results from Twitter. What the folks at The Summarizer should do is to have two sections – one for the social web and the other for popular news happening around the world, just like Google News and other news aggregator.