A new software tool will help journalists see breaking news tweets as they are happening. The program, called Seriously Rapid Source Review, is still under development -- but will act like a sieve that pull tweets from key sources currently sharing reports, images and video from the ground.
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Researchers at Rutgers University and Microsoft developed Seriously Rapid Source Review to give journalists access to breaking news like never before. Reporters won't have to comb the web -- or Twitter's 200 million tweets a day -- for sources.
Nick Diakopoulos, one of the project's authors, stated in a blog post that the program was built to deal with how much news is breaking on social media these days. Its features should help journalists distinguish accurate and trustworthy sources.
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SRSR features include automatic identification of eyewitnesses with approximate 89% precision and will list users in various archetypes -- journalists, bloggers, organizations or unaffiliated citizens.
To avoid a false tweet problem, such as the preemptive report of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno’s death in January, SRSR will use context clues to assess the verity and credibility on sources based on their Twitter profiles. The program will determine where a person says they are, plus look at the locations of friends and followers within a source's network.
Another component will look at the top five most mentioned companies, people or places mentioned in someone's feed.
The SRSR culls data from Twitter profiles, user-provided descriptions, data from follower and following lists. A report based on a search term will compile the sources sharing tweets that match the search terms.
The SRSR is still in its development stage. The researchers have not used been able to use real-time Tweets because of limitations in applying the Twitter API. For this project researchers used pre-collected and processed data from Twitter.
As for using the current prototype to catch the first couple tweets about Whitney Houston's death, Diakopoulos tells The Poynter Institute, it's unlikely that SRSR would have caught the very first tweets. Future developments, however, can lead to these connections.
Tell us in the comments if you personally take steps to verify tweets before retweeting or reporting news.
[via Poynter]
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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