There are several tools where you just enter a twitter handle and you can create a story or news hub.

We have storify (beta) that turns what people post on social media into stories.  Collect the best photos, video, tweets and more to publish them as simple, beautiful stories that can be embedded anywhere.

There is paper.li that creates sort of newspaper with just twitter handles and lists and even Facebook.  A different and nice way to discover new content…  See mine for example: http://paper.li/tokao

Lanyrd,  via Twitter, track event sessions and keep up with favorite speakers — at all stages in the conference lifecycle.

Some newlywed couples work to produce an offspring on their honeymoon. Most don’t labor towards birthing a startup. But that’s exactly what British entrepreneurs Natalie Downe and Simon Willison did on their post-nuptial adventure. After traveling in Europe and Africa, the couple caught ill in Casablanca and extended their stay and booked an apartment to recover.

The pair have a shared love for building projects in their spare time — which is why, with all that extra time in a bedroom, they managed to create and release an early build of Lanyrd. Within two hours of its launch, Downe and Willison saw the site generate more than 14,000 visits.

After finding immediate success with social media denizens, the couple applied to Y Combinator’s accelerator program. Lanyrd was accepted and has since relocated to Mountain View, California to complete it. The site remains a largely bootstrapped effort, though the couple did accept the $150,000 in convertible debt offered up by Start Fund.

Willison calls Lanyrd “the IMDb of conferences” — except that its content is crowdsourced. The site asks its users to do the heavy lifting for them by filling in the blanks on each conference: sessions, speakers and content. The incentive? The same as at any conference: self-aggrandizement. Organizers will go to any lengths to promote their events. Speakers want to flesh out their profiles by adding past, present and future engagements. And everyone wants to see useful conference content.

“Conferences are traditionally insufficient for transferring knowledge,” says Willinson. “Longer term, this is about capturing the value of what’s shared.”

Lanyrd’s tie-in with Twitter is ingenious — and almost spooky. Sign in with your Twitter handle, and you’ll automatically be greeted with a smorgasbord of contacts and upcoming conferences, drawn from your Twitter relationships. You may see that Lanyrd knows you spoke at a trade show last month, or that you’re on a panel this fall. The site already lists 6,000 crowdsourced conferences and 30,000 user profiles.

Downe and Willison opted to use Twitter’s social graph — rather than Facebook’s, say — because they believe the “follow” has more aspirational value than the “friend.” You likely already follow the people you’d like to know, the speakers you’d like to see talk. According to Lanyrd, you’ve already composed a list of the thought leaders you’d like to bump into at an upcoming conference. So Lanyard is well positioned to find the sessions of social relevance to you.

Since users are encouraged to add speakers and their Twitter names to sessions, the speaker need not be a Lanyrd user to have a Lanyrd presence. On signing up, you may notice your conference history has already been charted for you by your Twitter followers, organizers or fellow attendees.

Next up, Lanyrd has its sights set on South by Southwest, held in Austin next month. The startup launched its unofficial guide to the show Tuesday to help users find which sessions their Twitter friends are attending, and stay current on slides, videos and notes.

The SXSW tool marks Lanyrd’s first real test at a major conference. At worst, the event will provide a trove of data and real-world experiences that Downe and Willison can use to better determine how to serve users while they’re attending conferences.

Downe and Willison describe the chain of events following their June 2010 nuptials to their present day found status as an unexpected, whirlwind affair. Their story, and their startup, are still in their nascent stages. The couple will graduate from the Y Combinator program in March, and may be forced to return to the UK when their visas expire. But location may matter little to a startup that has successfully leveraged the power of an international hit like Twitter.

Image courtesy of SimonWillison.net

(from mashable)

Content is still the king.

In the past content was generated by a small elite of journalists, correspondents… big news agencies, or journalist with opinion and good writing.

This has been changing. They are struggling to find their place now. Traditional media is married to a physical support (paper) which is expensive to produce and distribute, it is not real time and the companies behind are not flexible and adaptable towards new models…. now we all have the tools to broadcast, write, publish our content.

Anyway, what I wanted to highlight in this blog post is that I have observed an evolution of the tools towards laziness and minimum effort.

We have the blogs, sure, and we will continue to have them, as we still have magazines and newspapers. We can build them around a topic we want or like, around our lives, our interests, our community… we can have it in isolation or being part of a blog community such as blogspot.

Then a new trend started. Not everybody has time or skills to write. In fact probably it is still a  minority. Other tools were more focused to the crowd: micro-blogs such as tumblr or posterous. Less writing. Just share something you see out there, a link a photo, …

Then twitter, with 140 characters, first in parallel with SMS, now twitter just twitter . Surprisingly it quickly became very very very popular.

Twitter is limited so a lot of complementary services were born around it: twitpic, yfrog… and even we have seen better twitter products that have ended up dieing. Products  like Buzz or Brightkite, not limited in space, handling location, photos, comments… for me far superior products… but I guess this is life. Beta was also superior to VHS and it was VHS who won.

So we have gone from Blogging to micro blogging to twittering, to twittering with location (foursquare, gowalla) to now a whole new wave of social media products:

Just take a photo with your phone, have your network, comment, like, push it to all the social media channels… no writing. Is this laziness?

Check out what is hot on this: Instagram and PicPlz

Of course they all coexist but I am curios to see how this evolves. I believe Brightkite was too early to be successful. Same with Buzz and even Wave.

In any case, everybody is in Facebook and facebook evolves and has everything: wall for short or long messages, link stories, videos, add comments, photos, checkins …  an ecosystem where everybody is and that offers everything.

Still the perception for the people is that is a closed ecosystem where all the friends are. Same for linkedin and your professional cloud.

Perception is key. Even if Facebook has attempted to change this, by trying to make things public and therefore creating a controversy on privacy issues, they are still perceived as a closed tool and the content you find there is thought as this: confidential for friends only.

There is also the fact that it is becoming too big, even at the point of threatening the Internet itself.

Are twitter and instagram and the others just for a minority of people who want to broadcast to everybody with the dream of being popular? marketing tools for individuals and companies?

A media for spreading news fast?

I’d like to read you in the comments.

Twitter announced that will be adding location or places as they call it to twitter.

When you first here about it you think that this will kill foursquare and gowalla, but if you read twitter’s blog you will see that apart from letting people tag specific places they will also allow apps like gowalla’s and foursquare linked to twitter (the big bro) post also specific locations.

In addition to this twitter will allow external apps to access places information through an improved API.

Will this kill Gowalla and Foursquare?

Well they both have a niche: games, major, stuff you leave, photos, tips, so … I don’t think so. It will just make twitter better.Also don’t forget about Google Places:

In the last months we have seen some Internet titans redesign their websites.

Facebook

First it was Facebook. They changed a lot. Before they had this bar at the bottom of the page with the apps, chat and so, which is now back to the traditional menus in the top and left.

People complained at the beginning, but this is normal. Changes of this type should be done in consultation with users, but in a dictatorship way. What do I mean with this? People do not like change. When people is used to a way of seeing information and to interact, to change it will always mean to go for worse, at least at the beginning. Over time, users will recognize that the changes were for good.

Twitter

Twitter was the second to change. The strength of twitter is updated tweets, and trends.
I have talked about twitter many times. At the beginning they struggled to cope with growth and they were down very often. Now they struggle to catch up with things like brighkite (which I love) does: location and photo. Even they could have video, maps and so… but no, they keep it simple. It remind me the fight between video VHS and Betamax. Betamax was the best technical option but VHS won. Well, twitter is not the best, but they have the most important ingredient: success.
Now popular topics, tweets, and users are clear in the frontpage. A “Top Tweets” section that dynamically updates using a custom algorithm to decide what is popular or of general interest. I have always though that the trends are absolutely useless but top tweets could be good, unless we start seeing “good night” or “followfridays”… They also have added a dynamically scrolling list of trending topics that when hovered over explain their trending status.

Youtube

The last redesign was for YouTube. Again people complained. If you take a look at YouTube you will be surprised by the simplicity. It is basically no design. Nothing. Very interesting that such a successful website chooses this simplistic approach. Their secret is in the ajax-like movement of things, with a new commenting system that highlights top-rated comments,  a “like/dislikes” rating system that replaces the previous five star system and a new “next video to watch” sidebar that is “smarter”. It feels different but not a lot. Take a look at the menus, the footer menu, just plain text. No lines no nothing. Is this more user friendly? It is less cluttered, that is for sure. Maybe because it is a google product and googles is not… well particular at design?

Twitter has improved  #trends by adding local trends.

For me trends as twitter shows them are spammy and useless. For what I see with this improvement, only a few cities in the world are included. Obviously not Barcelona, where I am now, or Geneva where I live.

Twitter just released to everybody the ‘list’ feature.

In a nutshell what you can do with your lists is to cluster the people you follow (for instance) in topics.

In my cases at @tokao I see everybody, while @tokao/tech the twits about tech, and so on.

I think it is one of the best things twitter has done since the beginning.

Yeap… and other social media sites are experiencing similar attacks.

You can connect your Twitter account and your Google Calendar to add events to your calendar by Direct Message. It’s like having a personal assistant!

Step 1: Follow the instructions at Twittercal.com to get set up
Step 2: Send a Direct Message to gcal to enter a new calendar appointment. Example: “D gcal meeting with John P at Twisted Root on Saturday July 10 at 1:00 PM”

Ping.fm is a simple and free service that makes updating your social networks a snap, with over 40 social networking sites and adding more all the time.

Between ping.fm straight forward posting methods and advanced custom triggers, we make it easy for you to post your messages exactly where you want them to go.

Give it a try!

Are you new to twitter? Then this is a very good resource for you:
Twitter Lists.

And more video tutorials here.

The new generation Twitter client for people who value their time and are tired of information noise.

Mixero.