Twitter has become a constant companion to users, especially during major cultural events or breaking news, and the company's CEO Dick Costolo wants to make the service better for users during those spikes in usage. As reported by TechCrunch, Costolo spoke at a panel at Brookings' Center for Technology Innovation today and mentioned how he wants to help users make sense of the rapid volume of data flying by in real-time during major events. While Twitter users currently have to deal with the familiar chronological stream of Tweets — that can often move too fast to keep up with — Costolo's imagining a new tool that lets you graphically keep up with key moments of discussion. "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," he said.
That ability to track and monitor the moments within an event...is something we want to enhance
Costolo is also envisioning a "DVR mode" that lets people keep up with the discussion around live events — like the Mad Men season finale, for example — that they might be watching on a delay. Overall, the CEO is looking to make it easier to cut through the noise of Twitter during events without losing the feel of a live, free-flowing discussion. "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 referred to Twitter's previous attempts at distilling the massive volume of information that comes out of major events for its users — he specifically cited the company's 2012 Olympics spotlight site as an effort that ultimately didn't work the way he wanted it to. "The amazing thing about that was that you lost the roar of the crowd," he said — it sounds like the approach was a bit too curated for Costolo's tastes. While these features are still in the testing phase, it wouldn't surprise us to see them roll out before a high-profile event — like next year's Super Bowl.