A lot of people use Twitter as a primary way of getting information quickly these days. Accounts such as BreakingNews are hugely popular because they offer up stories to their 1.6 million followers (and even more through retweets) instantaneously. Topicfire, a realtime news aggregator we covered in December is now trying to extend that concept to all different topics.
While there are no shortage of services attempting to leverage Twitter to distill information for different topics, Topicfire’s streams seem pretty solid thanks to the use of their HeatRank technology, which is the same thing that powers Topicfire itself. While there are a few factors that go into HeatRank, the main driving force behind it are comments on stories. If they’re coming in fast enough, the HeatRank will get pushed to 10.
If a story hits 10, it will then get tweeted out automatically to its specific Twitter account with a link to the original story as well as the story’s page on Topicfire. This method of curation ensures that followers won’t get overwhelmed by stories that perhaps aren’t that important.
You can see the full list of the 24 Topicfire accounts here. As you can see, they range from Apple news, to design news, to skiing news, to surfing news (though ski and surf don’t have a ton of news items).
