Twitter Is Working on A "DVR Mode" and Better Live Event Coverage

Twitter is apparently working on a new live events platform, that will function in some capacity similar to a DVR.  The news came by way of Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo at a technology panel this morning.  Twitter has long been the dominant platform for discussing TV shows and other live events, “90 percent of all public conversation online about TV is happening on Twitter,” said Jared Feldman, founder and CEO of Mashwork, a social intelligence company.

Earlier this year, Twitter acquired Bluefin Labs, a social TV analytics company, in an effort to bolster its social analytic offerings.  “That ability to track and monitor the moments within an event, either as they happen or to catch up with them, is something we want to enhance,” said Costolo. “We want to make that experience even better, curating the moments within the event, the media from it, and making it that much easier to navigate.”

Costolo also went on to reflect about how Twitter had tried during the last Olympics, to curate and highlight tweets from athletes and news commenters, but ultimately found that the solution was lacking.  Costolo made it clear that Twitter still aspires to be the “town square” for conversations, something it thought the approach taken with the Olympics lacked.

Twitter has made it known it wants to be the main second screen and is clearly looking to further improve and solidify its presence as the second screen with some new features its working on.

“We’re not in the business of synthesizing and analyzing,” he said. “It’s the journalists and the news organizations in the world who will take all this info and analyze and curate it as they’ve always done,” he went on to say.

So in an effort to address the signal to noise ratio problem, Twitter is experimenting with a new live events tool that it hopes will keep the “town square” feel, while still highlighting the key moments. Right now, keeping track of live events on Twitter is very primitive, as you are probably aware, you are essentially just following the tweets in reverse chronological order, but that will soon change with this new feature.

“It would be nice to see things like a graphic of spikes in the conversation, what timed they happened, and be able to scroll back to that time to see what happened at that particular moment,” Costolo said. And for planned events, he added that Twitter would like to offer that same functionality to users, even if they’re watching the event on a delayed basis. He described this as being able to “follow along with Twitter in a DVR mode.”

Perhaps that could help prevent major spoilers from occurring?  I guess we’ll have to wait and see.