ON THE FLY How news media are making friends in the world of social networking

Twitter says tools for journos are being worked on

Twitter CEO Evan Williams being questioned by John Battelle about the site's future plans at Web 2.0 Summit 2009 (Photo: James Duncan Davidson)

Twitter’s CEO says that they are putting significant resources into improving how journalists can search tweets.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams said they were pleased that journalists were using the site to get information.

In a conference Q&A he said: “I’m glad that you [journalists] are seeing that use. We’re putting a ton of effort into search and discovery on twitter. It's pretty clear that we’ve just scratched the surface at what's possible.

"We have all this real time data, and as I like to think about it we have all this millions of information collecting nodes all over the world reporting on what is happening and we have the ability to mine that and display that in real time. But we need to get much more intelligent about that, it's primitive in terms of how search goes.”

However he said that it was likely that most tools for journalists for the site would be developed by third parties rather than Twitter. Williams said: “The specific tools for media and journalists is a great area for third party developers to focus on because we need to focus on what the mass users need.”

Williams also talked about the site's new Lists feature that promises to help new users find people to follow and filter overflowing streams of tweets. The feature will be available to all users around the end of October.

Earlier this month Williams said he thought journalists had role in helping audiences sifting the signal from the noise on the site.

The full video of the Q&A with John Battelle can be found below.