Twitter has quickly turned into one of the best places to discover new media — be it video, images, or links — as soon as it comes out. Videos that may take hours or even days to surface on sites like Digg can virally spread across Twitter in a fraction of the time. As Fred Wilson put it, the value of Twitter lies in “the power of passed links”.
TuneIn, a new startup presenting today at today’s RealTime CrunchUp, is looking to harness this media and present it in an easily searchable, consumable format.
Using the site should be pretty straightforward for anyone who has used the main Twitter web interface. You’ll see your normal Twitter feed in the center of the page, but on the right side you’ll also see a list of the latest article links, videos, and photos that your Twitter friends have shared. You can choose to sort these shared links by popularity (the more Tweets a link gets, the more popular it becomes) or simply by time. And if you’d prefer to see media shared by only a select group of the people you follow, you can break Twitter users into groups (called Channels).
If you’d like to browse only media and ignore other tweets entirely, you can do that too by hitting the ‘media’ tab on the left hand side of the page. Content is filtered into three columns: ‘articles’, ‘video’, and ‘images’, or you can arrange everything into a handy grid with thumbnails of each item.
TuneIn isn’t the first startup to do this kind of media aggregation: Tweetmeme has been using Twitter to surface hot articles, images, and video for quite a while.
Here’s the video from the demo of TuneIn at the event:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTP7sOD3_Fo&hl=en&fs=1&]
