As you scroll through your twitter feed, that orange bird avatar keeps sticking out its beak, promoting the latest interesting buzz on Twitter.
Welcome to Twitchy, the latest project created by web entrepreneur Michelle Malkin, a syndicated columnist sometimes featured in these pages.
Malkin, a powerhouse conservative voice, was one of the early adopters of Twitter. Today she has a following of over 250,000 followers.
“We like the name because it embodies our vibe — kinetic, energetic, always moving, never static,” Malkin explained in an interview with the Washington Examiner about her project.
As a news consumer, Malkin immediately recognized Twitter’s power to break news, push a narrative, and drive a conversation that was smart, fun, and interesting. “I think that Twitter is the future, the here and now of news aggregation, news curation, and news consumption,” Malkin said.
Malkin, already the founder of the political blogging juggernaut HotAir.com, turned her entrepreneurial spirit to Twitter last summer. With some help from her husband and like-minded “tweeps,” Malkin launched Twitchy on March 7, 2012.
Twitchy’s mission, Malkin explains, is to share the conversation on Twitter with new users, and to highlight the important news — and important or amusing Twitter moments — that power users might have missed.
“One of the most enjoyable things about being on Twitter is being able to see your friends and public figures as more than just flat one-dimensional figures and bringing the joy, the fun, the humor, harnessing all of that,” she said.
Malkin wants Twitchy to focus on more than just politics. Currently, the site has sections for Global News, US Politics, Entertainment, Sports, and Media. Politics are obviously close to Malkin’s heart — her columns, blog posts and tweets eviscerate liberals on a daily basis — but her interests are broader than a purely political focus would admit. “We wanted to capture that free spirit,” she said, “The water cooler is so much more diverse.”
Today, high-profile conservative pundits, political figures, and talk radio giants are all embracing Twitter to communicate with their fans. Radio giant Rush Limbaugh recently joined Twitter, leading thousands of new conservative consumers to sign up for an account.
Those are the new users that Malkin wants to reach out to. “We want to tell people who said what — let them know as soon as it happens. We will do more showing than telling.” she said, explaining a majority of their work will be highlighting the best news and tweets of the day.
It’s not an uncommon formula for success. As an early adopter of the internet, Matt Drudge launched the Drudge Report as a news aggregation site. It remains among the most influential voices online — as most bloggers and news websites know, a link from Drudge is a traffic bonanza.
Malkin said that currently, few sites exist that are solely dedicated to highlighting important happenings on Twitter.
“The current generation of twitter curators are completely useless,” she said. “You get this fire hose of information, and most of them are operated by computer algorithms. They have no nuance, they can’t tell sarcasm from straight news tweets, and there is no prioritizing.”
To move her project forward, Malkin reached out to several people on Twitter that had diverse backgrounds, but shared an addiction to Twitter and to newsworthy events. Currently she has 10 staffers combing through Twitter in search of the latest big story.
“I think we can do it better and faster and funnier,” she said.
