Five Twitter Feeds You Must Follow

Forget Ashton, Britney, and Obama. If you want to get something significant out of Twitter, we recommend these five sources of 140-character information.

Every Friday, I’m compiling a list of five things that meet one criterion. “What is that criterion,” you ask? Well, it’s going to change every week and you’re just going to have to try and keep up.

This week…

Five Twitter Feeds You Must Follow

Most of the buzz surrounding the rise of Twitter centered on celebrities keeping people completely abreast of their every move or friends and family keeping in touch every few minutes. While these two facets of the medium’s explosion are obviously valuable and popular, the service holds a far greater value for the purposes of promotion and meaningful information dissemination from non-individuals and I’ve listed five of the best of these sources below.

5. NBA

Though admittedly meaningless to those uninterested in professional basketball, even non-fans will have trouble denying that no professional sports league is as on-top of Twitter as the NBA. You’ll get live scoring updates on close and important games across the league at night and great deals on tickets/merchandise during the day (plus, y’know, news). And don’t worry: the person (people?) feeding us all the time clearly knows what they’re doing and what they’re supposed to be doing – the NBA will not give you any dumb Tweets.

Example Tweet: Balanced scoring helps @Celtics to 47-39 lead over @Spurs at Half. Perk, Allen, Parker all w/9pts. 2nd Half on TNT

4. The Telegraph’s Weird News

Every newspaper will donate a tiny bit of web space and/or actual page space to odd stories all over the world but there really isn’t an easy way to synthesize the ocean of meaningful, substantial news down to a nice list of just the weird news. Until now.

Example Tweet: Penguin searches for winter coat http://bit.ly/7XbLVo

3. National Geographic Society

This is the perfect addition to your Twitter roll call for no reason other than the great daily pictures (like these).

Example Tweet: Top Ten Discoveries of 2009: National Geographic News's most popular coverage of 2009 scientific finds – http://bit.ly/87eDt2 What's yours?

2. Amazon Gold Box Deals

Even if you try to check Amazon’s daily deals every morning, there’s invariably going to come a day when you forget or you overlook something because of a misleading thumbnail or you miss out on a great late-afternoon deal because you neglect to visit the site every hour and for all of those reasons, keeping tabs on Amazon Gold Box Deals via Twitter is awesome and helpful.

Example Tweet: Deal of the Day: $59.99 – Save on “How I Met Your Mother: Seasons 1-4”

1. The New York Times

Updated about fifty times per day, no other Twitter news feed will keep you up to date on important stories as well as the Times. Links to full-length articles are included unless it’s a wordy breaking news alert (perfect for text alerts or quick Tweetdeck skimming).

Example Tweet: Ancient Surfboard Style Is Finding New Devotees http://bit.ly/6dvFi0

And of course, if you're not following us on Twitter yet, check us out as well @primermag.

Justin Brown

Justin Brown is an artist and writer living in Virginia. He channels most of his enthusiasm into making things for his online art shop, Artness! by Justin Brown. You can keep up to date with him, his worldly adventures, and his dogs by following him on Instagram and on Facebook