A super secret project that Twitter has been working on is about to be unveiled for public use soon. Called Project Lightning, it’s all about helping curate the best content on the micro-blogging site to help users, and even non-users, follow and keep up to date with all tweets, posts, videos, pictures, that are relevant to an ongoing global event, cultural phenomenon or breaking news story. Since Twitter is probably the social media venue that best serves this kind of online conversation, it is a logical next move for them.
The project will bring a new button in the center of the home row that will bring curated content concerning an event that has everyone talking, be it an awards show like the Oscars or a sports event like the World Cup, or a breaking news story like an earthquake in a certain part of the world. It will not just show tweets but also immersive content like photos and videos, even from other apps like Vine or Periscope. It will not look anything like your usual Twitter timeline. Each of the content, whether it be a tweet, photo or video will take up the entire screen of your smartphone, and you just need to swipe through them one by one.
The idea behind this is that it won’t be difficult for you to look for the best and most relevant content concerning the event that you’re interested in, since they will already be curating the hundreds, maybe thousands of tweets about that event or incident you’re following. You can choose to follow an event and then the curated tweets will go in your timeline as well. But that doesn’t mean you will necessarily follow the accounts or authors (unless you want to). One of the best things about this is that you don’t need to be logged on to Twitter or even to have a Twitter account to be able to view the curated tweets.
Now as to when this will go live is still a big question. Currently, they are building the new media teams from major markets around the world. They are also developing an editorial policy to determine which tweets will be included or not, and this, along with data tools, will determine the content on Project Lightning. For now, we have to wait with bated breath.
VIA: Buzzfeed
