News Break

Testing the patterns.

Today’s post is going to be brief because I’ve been a bit distracted. I just want point to three things I’ve seen over the last week or so that I think are interesting illustrations of Twitter’s continued march toward dominating the way we’ll get our news and information.

First, Twitter and the Weather Channel have entered a partnership which leverages the recently expanded capabilities of Twitter Cards. The deal, according to All Things D, will allow users to, “see video clips of local forecasts, severe-weather coverage, or user-generated content.” These customizable clips will let the Weather Channel to add sponsored content directly into the stream of all of their followers, with a portion of the marketing price going, presumably, to both the Weather Channel and Twitter.

Second, Bloomberg announced that it will be incorporating Twitter into its Bloomberg Professional service. This will give subscribers instant access to updates about the companies, executives, and industries that influence traders’ every decision in the same platform in which they execute those decisions. With this integration, Bloomberg has almost completely removed the barrier between intelligence and execution.

“When important news is shared on Twitter, traders and investors need to be able to access it, and validate its importance in order to incorporate that information into their decision making process.”
Jean-Paul Zammitt– Head of Bloomberg Professional Sales and Product Development, 04 April 2013

Lastly, as a final illustration of the correlation between the speed of information and profit-driven actions, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, source of the reports on our jobs numbers, released last month’s employment stats through an update the moment they were available—faster than any other news outlet.

March payroll employment edges up (+88,000); unemployment rate changes little (7.6%)go.usa.gov/vrK #JobsReport #BLSdata
— BLS-Labor Statistics (@BLS_gov) April 5, 2013

Quartz does a good job of explaining what the process is and why it’s important, and I encourage you to take a look at their piece.

All three of these stories show the increasing willingness of some of the old guard of information providers to incorporate the strongest real-time information network available. For the companies embracing this thinking, it will be a differentiator—not just because they’re trying something new, but because what they’re trying will pay off in new ways of transforming information into action.

And that’s the whole point, right? We’ll see how it pans out for them in the days, weeks, and months to come, starting when I see you on the ‘morrow, on the Web.