Google News, meet Twitter News.
Twitter said Tuesday that it launched a new version of its "Discover" tab, which will attempt to present relevant news stories to users, based on tweets from people followed by the primary account holder.
The update is currently rolling out to Web users accessing Twitter.com, as well as those who use the Android and iOS versions of the Twitter app. The process will take weeks, Twitter said.
"This update is part of our ongoing development of Discover; we will continue to work to make discovery on Twitter a magical experience that brings you instantly closer to the information that matters most to you at the right time, any time," Satya Patel, vice president of product for Twitter, said in a blog post.
The recommendations are based on which news stories users follow, as well as who those users follow, Patel wrote.
For years, Google has provided its own Google News service, aggregating news stories based on its own search algorithms, which crawl the Web and determine which news stories are the most popular at any one time. Historically, Google has tended to base its picks on how many stories are being published on any given topic at any one time, although the site now allows users to "weight" stories on given topics. "In Depth" and "Highly Cited" tags also reward news stories that others reference or are in a long-form format.
Facebook's platform apps also point users toward content friends have shared, with apps like the Washington Post Social Reader informing friends of which Post stories friends have recently read. On Tuesday, reports surfaced that the paper was in the process of acquiring Digg, another social reading site that has recently struggled.
Anecdotally, Twitter users appear to either use the service for sharing pithy comments or to share a link to published content elsewhere. A 2011 survey by Localytics somewhat bears this out: it found that Twitter users push 50 "events" to their friends, per 1,000 users. Facebook users, by contrast, only share 11 per 1,000 users.
For now, either the new Twitter Discover tab is glitchy, or else it hasn't quite sampled enough of my own Twitter feed. Although my feed includes tweets about BlackBerry 10 and the upcoming movie The Dark Knight Rises, the third entry on the list is "Maxwell Drew Johnson," the name of pop star Jessica Simpson's new baby. I have no interest in this whatsoever.
For more from Mark, follow him on Twitter @MarkHachman.
