Managing options

Robin Good: As you have probably already read somewhere else, this last weekend, Twitter launched a first-of-a-kind type of page.

The page, which you can see here: https://twitter.com/hashtag/nascar revolves around the last NASCAR car racing event, that took place last Sunday and it apparently aggregates interesting tweets and comments from a group of passionate NASCAR fans.

The interesting thing is that this page is in fact not an automatically aggregated page of tweets having a specific hashtag. There have been plenty of tweets in here with no hashtag at all, or not even mentioning explicitly NASCAR.

This is a human-curated page of tweets, selected from a curated list of relevant people for this topic.

This is the real news.

By mixing and matching technology-powered identification of relevant people and tweets for a specific topic, with an active layer of human curation allows Twitter to generate a page that's filled with value.

Here's what Twitter itself wrote on his blog before launching it: "...throughout the weekend – but especially during the race – a combination of algorithms and curation will surface the most interesting Tweets to bring you closer to all of the action happening around the track, from the garage to the victory lane."

And while this is only a first experiment from Twitter, I would bet that it will not be the last.

The value provided by adding a human curation layer, both to the selection of the sources as well as to the selection of the actual tweets, is huge.

What's your take?

Twitter NASCAR page: https://twitter.com/hashtag/nascar ;
 

Twitter blog announcement: http://blog.twitter.com/2012/06/off-to-races-with-nascar.html ;

Check also: http://rossneumann.tumblr.com/post/24960053871/twitter-wants-to-put-social-media-editors-out-of ;