Ever since the Summer Olympics, we have been seeing that Twitter is trying to become a media company. This is also what John Battelle argues in his new blog post (http://battellemedia.com/archives/2013/01/portrait-of-twitter-as-a-young-media-company.php)

He writes that Twitter is curating and even creating content for its users But Twitter will need to do a lot more if it wantes to become a relevant new-media venture. For instance, Twitter has the “Oscars Index” (a partnership with Topsy) which tracks sentiments around Oscar-nominated movies leading up to the Academy Awards. Within this index tweets are analyzed and evaluated. Twitter also has announced that they want to create a “Twitter TV Rating” for TV shows together with Nielsen, showing that they have something interesting to offer to media companies and of course advertisers. If you consider that there are more than half-a-billion tweets sent out per day…that is a lot of valuable data and insight.

Twitter, Google, Facebook: they want to offer exactly the same – be able to deliver personalized content to their users. But I believe that delivering and curating meaningful information to individual users from this vast amount of data is far from realization. But as Batelle points out, Twitter has started to improve its Discovery tab and he says  “Twitter presents a massive search problem/opportunity. For example, Twitter’s gotten better and better at what’s called “entity extraction” – identifying a person, place, or thing, then associating behaviors and attributes around that thing.”

The advantage that social media has is that – compared to traditional content like newspapers – it has the ability to curate content for individuals. So the race to get there first has begun and Twitter has a good chance due to its data to win if they are able to deliver to
.