On Tuesday, just days after introducing its Meerkat rival Periscope, Twitter rolled out its potential rival to Storify: Curator, a new product designed to enable media publishers and eventually lay users to search the flood of tweets and vines in the Twitterverse, filter them by content or author, curate them, and package them into a coherent storyline.
With Curator, media organizations can now create more complex hashtag and keyword search queries, filter the search results by location or the high number of followers, and assemble them into collections of tweets and vines that most directly pertain to a breaking news event, high-profile press conference, or an ongoing March Madness game. As Twitter spokesperson Matt Dennebaum wrote on the company’s media blog:
Curator was built to allow media publishers to search, filter and curate Twitter content that can then be displayed on web, mobile and TV. Those who have been testing Curator have seen strong increases in audience engagement, participation and attention. With these encouraging results, we’re opening up the product to all media publishers around the world, for free. This includes news organizations, production companies, broadcasters, local governments, and even concert venues.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was among the people invited to beta-test Curator, and his office used the tool to create a customized twitter feed of a recent press conference:
Screen shot.
This new service is very similar to that offered by Storify, although the latter draws from platforms like Facebook and YouTube in addition to Twitter. The service is available to media organizations for free; press outlets interested in Curator must register here to access it.
