Apple News was unveiled during the keynote at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, and it’s one of the new tentpole features baked into the incoming iOS 9, which is set to arrive later this year.

Then a new ‘Apple News’ app followed, a major initiative by Apple to host news articles and employ human editors to surface best content for its uses.

According to a report published recently by BuzzFeed, Project Lightning is Twitter’s new focus on news curation, and it will be handled by human beings behind the scenes. With this project, news will now be shown in a more coherent fashion in one’s Timeline, giving them a new way to follow the news story that’s breaking (or just generally interesting), rather than follow a steady stream of Twitter users like normal, with some of them posting about the news a user wants to follow.
The human curated content will not just include the tweets regarding the subject, but also news articles, photos, videos and more. What’s more, Project Lightning will allow for stories to be updated even after they’ve been shared, so that a steady stream of new content is always present.

One of the strongest elements of this new initiative from the social network is its reach, as Twitter aims to get it as widely available as possible. These stories will be available within the Twitter app, both for mobile and desktops, but also even when a user isn’t logged into the service. These stories will be easily shareable, too, which should make Twitter an even more powerful source within the news field moving forward.

“There’s a beautiful connection to our strategy of reaching users on every platform,” says Weil. “It’s not just logged-in Twitter, it’s logged-out, and it’s syndicated on other websites and mobile apps. This reaches all of them. The collections are a core part of our logged-in experience — that’s the point of being in the center tab. But you can easily imagine them as logged-out experiences telling about something happening now out in the world. And you can imagine them — and this is new — as collections and syndicating them across any website or mobile app.“

The company’s been moving too slowly and in the wrong direction for such a long time now. I’m actually not surprised at all that growth has been stagnating as most normals sign up only to post a few random tweets and never come back. 

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