Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence (LPBI) Group

Twitter, Google, LinkedIn Enter in the Curation Foray: What’s Up With That?

 

Reporter: Stephen J. Williams, Ph.D.

Recently Twitter has announced a new feature which they hope to use to increase engagement on their platform. Originally dubbed Project Lightning and now called Moments, this feature involves many human curators which aggregate and curate tweets surrounding individual live events(which used to be under #Live).

As Madhu Muthukumar (@justmadhu), Twitter’s Product Manager, published a blog post describing Moments said:

“Every day, people share hundreds of millions of tweets. Among them are things you can’t experience anywhere but on Twitter: conversations between world leaders and celebrities, citizens reporting events as they happen, cultural memes, live commentary on the night’s big game, and many more,” the blog post noted. “We know finding these only-on-Twitter moments can be a challenge, especially if you haven’t followed certain accounts. But it doesn’t have to be.”

Please see more about Moments on his blog here.

Moments is a new tab on Twitter’s mobile and desktop home screens where the company will curate trending topics as they’re unfolding in real-time — from citizen-reported news to cultural memes to sports events and more. Moments will fall into five total categories, including “Today,” “News,” “Sports,” “Entertainment” and “Fun.” (Source: Fox)

Now It’s Google’s Turn

 

As Dana Blankenhorn wrote in his article Twitter, Google Try It Buzzfeed’s Way With Curation

in SeekingAlpha

“

What’s a challenge for Google is a direct threat to Twitter’s existence.

For all the talk about what doesn’t work in journalism, curation works. Following the news, collecting it and commenting, and encouraging discussion, is the “secret sauce” for companies like Buzzfeed, Vox, Vice and The Huffington Post, which often wind up getting more traffic from a story at, say The New York Times (NYSE:NYT), than the Times does as a result.

Curation is, in some ways, a throwback to the pre-Internet era. It’s done by people. (At least I think I’m a people.) So as odd as it is for Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) to announce it will curate live events it’s even odder to see Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) doing it in a project called YouTube Newswire.

Buzzfeed, Google’s content curation platform, made for desktop as well as a mobile app, allows sharing of curated news, viral videos.

The feel for both Twitter and Google’s content curation will be like a newspaper, with an army of human content curators determining what is the trendiest news to read or videos to watch.

BuzzFeed articles, or at least, the headlines can easily be mined from any social network but reading the whole article still requires that you open the link within the app or outside using a mobile web browser. Loading takes some time–a few seconds longer. Try browsing the BuzzFeed feed on the app and you’ll notice the obvious difference.

However it was earlier this summer in a Forbes article Why Apple, Snapchat and Twitter are betting on human editors, but Facebook and Google aren’t that Apple, Snapchat and Twitter as well as LinkedIn Pulse and Instragram were going to use human editors and curators while Facebook and Google were going to rely on their powerful algorithms. Google (now Alphabet) CEO Eric Schmidt has even called Apple’s human curated playlists “elitist” although Google Play has human curated playlists.

Maybe Google is responding to views on its Google News like this review in VentureBeat:

“

Google News: Less focused on social signals than textual ones, Google News uses its analytic tools to group together related stories and highlight the biggest ones. Unlike Techmeme, it’s entirely driven by algorithms, and that means it often makes weird choices. I’ve heard that Google uses social sharing signals from Google+ to help determine which stories appear on Google News, but have never heard definitive confirmation of that — and now that Google+ is all but dead, it’s mostly moot. I find Google News an unsatisfying home page, but it is a good place to search for news once you’ve found it.

“

Now WordPress Too!

 

WordPress also has announced its curation plugin called Curation Traffic.

According to WordPress

You Own the Platform, You Benefit from the Traffic

“The Curation Traffic™ System is a complete WordPress based content curation solution. Giving you all the tools and strategies you need to put content curation into action.

It is push-button simple and seamlessly integrates with any WordPress site or blog.

With Curation Traffic™, curating your first post is as easy as clicking “Curate” and the same post that may originally only been sent to Facebook or Twitter is now sent to your own site that you control, you benefit from, and still goes across all of your social sites.”

The theory the more you share on your platform the more engagement the better marketing experience. And with all the WordPress users out there they have already an army of human curators.

So That’s Great For News But What About Science and Medicine?

 

The news and trendy topics such as fashion and music are common in most people’s experiences. However more technical areas of science, medicine, engineering are not in most people’s domain so aggregation of content needs a process of peer review to sort basically “the fact from fiction”. On social media this is extremely important as sensational stories of breakthroughs can spread virally without proper vetting and even influence patient decisions about their own personal care.

Expertise Depends on Experience

In steps the human experience. On this site (www.pharmaceuticalintelligence.com) we attempt to do just this. A consortium of M.D.s, Ph.D. and other medical professionals spend their own time to aggregate not only topics of interest but curate on specific topics to add some more insight from acceptable sources over the web.

In Power of Analogy: Curation in Music, Music Critique as a Curation and Curation of Medical Research Findings – A Comparison; Dr. Larry Berstein compares a museum or music curator to curation of scientific findings and literature and draws similar conclusions from each: that a curation can be a tool to gain new insights previously unseen an observer. A way of stepping back to see a different picture, hear a different song.

 

For instance, using a Twitter platform, we curate #live meeting notes and tweets from meeting attendees (please see links below and links within) to give a live conference coverage

http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/press-coverage/

and curation and analysis give rise not only to meeting engagement butunique insights into presentations.

 

In addition, the use of a WordPress platform allows easy sharing among many different social platforms including Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc.

Hopefully, this will catch on to the big powers of Twitter, Google and Facebook to realize there exists armies of niche curation communities which they can draw on for expert curation in the biosciences.

Other posts on this site on Curation and include

 

Inevitability of Curation: Scientific Publishing moves to embrace Open Data, Libraries and Researchers are trying to keep up

The Methodology of Curation for Scientific Research Findings

Scientific Curation Fostering Expert Networks and Open Innovation: Lessons from Clive Thompson and others

The growing importance of content curation

Data Curation is for Big Data what Data Integration is for Small Data

Stem Cells and Cardiac Repair: Content Curation & Scientific Reporting

Cardiovascular Diseases and Pharmacological Therapy: Curations

Power of Analogy: Curation in Music, Music Critique as a Curation and Curation of Medical Research Findings – A Comparison