When US Airways 1549 went down in the Hudson River yesterday, some of the first pictures of the event were posted via Twitter, the online and mobile messaging system that allows users to instantly post 140-character missives as well as hyperlinks to pictures and web pages. Twitter has, in effect, given anyone with a cell phone the ability to send immediate, eyewitness news updates out over a public wire.
Now, Yahoo is using the immediacy of Twitter to make its own news service better: the company’s researchers have launched a simple search engine called TweetNews that ranks Yahoo News stories by using information about the most recent, frequently-tweeted topics on Twitter.
Source: Yahoo Uses Twitter To Filter The News
With nearly all the major cell phone carriers supporting some kind of Twitter integration and nearly every mobile phone having video and audio capabilities it really is no surprise. How soon will major news agencies start using these tweets of live new events? Will the audacious reporter on the scene be replaced with the happless bystander?
Its only a matter of time live video feeds will be common place especially with 4G coming around the corner.