Tweetminster prepares to move beyond politics – relaunches as a 'News Platform'

Tweetminster, which we’ve been describing as a UK politics tracker powered by Twitter, has undergone another revamp today with the launch of the Tweetminster News Platform, which will replace the current version of the site.

The new Tweetminster and third major update attempts to pull together all of the technology that the UK startup has developed – the ability to identify influencers and experts on Twitter, see what content they and their networks are paying attention to and aggregate that content – to present the outcome in a more mainstream way. The result is a data driven news aggregator still powered by Twitter but in a way that perhaps de-emphasises the idiosyncrasies of the micro-blogging service. Quite deliberately, you don’t need to be a Twitter user or perhaps even know what Twitter is in order to consume the content that Tweetminster harvests from those influencers and experts in a given topic.

In addition, with its new focus as a “News Platform”, Tweetminster plans to roll out new standalone verticals beyond politics and current affairs. These will launch over the “next few weeks and months”, says Alberto Nardelli, Tweetminster co-founder and CEO, although he isn’t yet saying what those topic areas will be.

The way the Tweetminster News Platform presents content sort of reminds me of what services like Paper.li and Flipboard are trying to do – and in fact Tweetminster uses HTML5 to make it smartphone and tablet-ready – but with a key difference. Those aforementioned services rely on a user’s own Twitter or Facebook networks/social graph to curate or pull in content. In other words, they’re more social and require greater work up front.

In contrast, says Nardelli, “we’re trying to lower the barrier to entry by aggregating experts in a given topic, analysing what they pay attention to and packaging that content in a immediately useful format.”

The other thing to note with Tweetminster is that the content that is generated and how it’s presented is entirely driven by data and completely free from editorial intervention.

“Our goal is to make Twitter useful for people who may not even be using the service. Users won’t need to check loads of sources, build their own networks, find and follow interesting people nor create or ‘curate’ lists relevant to their interests”, says Nardelli.