Twitter has long been touting its capabilities as a breaking news service. When something big happens, odds are there’s someone taking to the microblogging service to tweet about it.
Now, Twitter wants to leverage that into a personalized service that sends you a direct message whenever a major piece of breaking news that might be relevant to you comes across the service’s wires. The company has created @eventparrot, an experiment that users can opt into to receive the news.
Whenever news breaks, @eventparrot sends you a direct message with the link to its source alongside a headline. It’s unclear yet how personalized @eventparrot’s messages are, or how granular Twitter plans to get with them in the future. The company does have access to where your profile says you are, as well as where you actually are (if you geo-tag your tweets), so it should be able to tailor your news results to what’s going on around you.
That account feels remarkably like @magicrecs, which recommended people for you to follow through DM, and has since grown up into a full-fledged part of Twitter’s service. It’s possible that @eventparrot is the future of how you would get breaking news through Twitter, rather than having to rely on a hodge-podge of mobile apps that all send you push notifications whenever something happens.
Twitter hasn’t officially announced the initiative, but it’s described as “a Twitter experiment” and has other hallmarks that make it clear that it was created by the company.
If you’re interested in getting DMs from @eventparrot, just go and follow it on Twitter. The service will do the rest.
