Via Smart Mobs, via Random Mumblings, comes this piece from The Digital Edge: “Twittering the News”
It’s an interesting concept – Newspapers using Twitter as a way of reaching new media savvy consumers. Because of the 140 character limit, the stories are effectively limited to headlines and short blurbs anyway, so it isn’t that great a leap from the publishing of headline-only RSS feeds, in the sense that the audience would still need to come back to the newspaper site to get the full story.
There are some significant limitations, though, as Lawton notes in the piece:
Twitter is still primarily a new toy for the tech-savvy, so the number of people using the service is still small compared to other social networking services. “I have a suspicion that if it breaks out beyond the web-savvy crowd that’s given it a lot of recent buzz, it’ll be because people find really useful applications,†Friesen said.
Twitter continues to seem to me like a solution in search of a problem – how is this different than subscribing to receive push alerts from a newspaper site by email, except that this time it’s SMS? (Of course, a number of different services, including CNN, have offered SMS alerts of breaking news for some time).
or 
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