If you do happen to have a fair bit of idea about Twitter’s user-base, you would know it isn’t the most inspiring of all. And the recent CEO shuffle just piled up on Twitter’s woes. However, the company isn’t sitting idle, and is now working on, as Buzzfeed’s Mat Honan reports, a secret new tool called Project Lightning. (Project probably prefixed as the tool is still in concept mode).
This new platform, which will be a standalone one, is meant to provide users and non users of the website with rich media content, regardless of their status. Lightning will supposedly bring event-based curated content to the Twitter platform. This content can include images and videos and can be derived from platforms such as Twitter, Vine, Periscope and many more. Also, the content will be pre-cached so as to reduce wait time and provide almost instant content at the users’ fingertips.
All of this content, will be made available to smartphone owners via an app, and will be available to both Twitter users as well as non-users.
However, users of Twitter will have a slightly upper hand, which you would obviously expect, as they will receive notifications on the oncoming developments of the event in their main feeds as soon as possible, until the event lasts.
The media content is said to be high quality and completely immersive for anyone. The videos are also reportedly high definition, taking up most of your screen. Images too, will take up full width of your screen and are high-definition. All in all, it is something primarily focused on a western userbase, and rightly so, considering Twitter’s minimal penetration in emerging markets.
For logged out users, it will just be an aroma of the full flavour. Sure you will get all the media in full quality and all, but the app will limit the comments you see and the stories that you read which are related. Moreover, you don’t get notifications about the event in question.
Lightning will not only get you through pre-scheduled events, it will also handle sudden breaking occurrences which just spring up without a warning.
Kevin Weil of Twitter says that this is a new way of looking at tweets, it is a bold change, not evolutionary.
It’s around anything that’s interesting. Weil explains. It could be current events. It could be breaking news. It could be awards shows or sports. But also cultural events and moments — things around your location and where you are. There’s amazing content, for example, posted to Throwback Thursday every single Thursday. But it’s hard to discover it; you have to work as a user to go and find the best stuff, but [we] can do it easily and can package it richly.
Once the events are underway, a special team of experts led by Katie Jacobs Stanton, who runs Twitter’s global media operations, will select what it thinks are the best and most relevant tweets and package them into a collection.
Lightning will be available to you everywhere you go. You may be logged in to Twitter or logged out, you may be using a desktop browser or a smartphone app, Lightning will follow you everywhere. The media might be embedded on Twitter or on another external link, it won’t matter, Lighting will make your media experience flawless.
However, if you look at the core of this new service, it is Twitter’s way of making Live event coverage, a focal point in its busines. And why not ? After all, almost all tech journalists and platforms today, tweet live on almost every major exhibition out there. This will be the new way for live event coverage as most modern startups in this sector are still lagging. Maybe Twitter will be the one to make this branch of content sharing perfect.
Twitter has not yet announced a specific time when this new innovative way of media sharing will be launched but reports say that there are only months left until we can get this at our fingertips.
