Twitter Unveils Curator, A Real-Time Search & Display Tool For Publishers

One of Twitter’s most useful publisher use cases is being able to find conversations taking place on Twitter and repurpose them elsewhere. The ability to leverage the social network’s stream of public content is a killer feature for news and other media organizations.

And today Twitter announced the release of a new tool — Curator — to make that effort easier. Curator enables publishers to search, filter and then display content from Twitter and Vine on the web, mobile and with special integrations television and other offline media.

Here’s a rundown of how Curator works from the Twitter blog post announcing the launch:

Curator enables publishers to create complex keyword and hashtag queries to easily uncover streams of high quality Tweets. Queries can be further refined by follower counts, location, languages and more to create collections of the most relevant Tweets pertaining to that topic. For example, you can find Tweets including #MarchMadness, from users with 100+ followers located in the US. You can then use Curator to display the best Tweets from that search into your mobile app, during a TV show broadcast, or on any screen regardless of size.

Curator sounds a lot like Storify, which digital news organizations have long used to display social media content. It also might appear to encroach on the market for third-party tools that glean insights from Twitter data, but Twitter says Curator isn’t intended to as a replacement for such tools. Mark Ghuneim, Curator’s GM, told TechCrunch that Curator is meant to surface content in real time, rather than provide analysis later and that Twitter considers it a “baseline” product for third-party companies to build upon with custom displays and other enhancements.

In its blog post, Twitter said intends to continue working with current partners such as Flowics, Livefyre, ScribbleLive, Spredfast and Wayin and look for opportunities to expand the partnerships.

Access to Curator is limited to publishers, defined by Twitter as including “news organizations, production companies, broadcasters, local governments, and even concert venues.” You can request access here.