It appears the Great Lakes are getting social.
The Great Lakes are getting social, whether they want to or not. Photo: NOAA GLERL
At least it does if you visit the new aggregation site, Social Great Lakes. The site has Twitter feeds lined up like stock tickers constantly in motion. They pull in tweets on news, travel, weather and sports in the Great Lakes, and then the same categories for each lake. The Twitter feeds are updated by searching entire tweets, not just hashtags.
The website is another project of news start-up, Social News Corp., based in San Francisco. The company compiles seemingly hundreds of news feeds, which all amount to scrolling Twitter posts relevant to a certain topic.
The Social Great Lakes site is just another cog in a giant aggregation wheel. A visit to Social News Corp. founder Mike Martino’s Twitter page shows dozens of links updated every few hours to newly launched Social-Fill-in-the-Blank websites, including Social Free Speech, Social Germany, Social Middle East, Social Israel, etc.
As someone who loves the Great Lakes and tolerates social media, I don’t get it. The site doesn’t organize news efficiently. With the feeds constantly scrolling, it makes me dizzy.
However, Twitter is here to stay. And with the amount of news and information pushed at us daily, Social News Corp. may be on to something.