<p>We've been arguing for some time that Twitter is becoming a media entity in its own right, and some of the company's moves around the Summer Olympics and other events have helped flesh out that theory. John Battelle of Federated Media argues much the same thing in a new blog post. He says Twitter wants to become a media company and that doing so means curating and even creating or "co-creating" content for its users. While this is undoubtedly true, Twitter is going to need to become a lot better at relevance and discovery if it really wants to be a new-media player.</p><p>In his post, Battelle describes how his thinking has been influenced by some of the recent offerings Twitter has come up with around broadcast events such as the "Oscars Index," (a partnership with Topsy), which tracks sentiment around Oscar-nominated movies and personalities leading up to the Academy Awards by analyzing tweets about them. Although Battelle doesn't mention it, Twitter recently announced an even more ambitious effort to create a verified "Twitter TV Rating" for TV shows as part of a partnership with media-metrics company Nielsen (NLSN).</p><p>The Federated Media founder points out correctly that one of the things that makes Twitter a potential gold mine for both media companies and for advertisers is the number of signals the network can accumulate about users, their behavior, and their interests. More than half-a-billion tweets a day is a lot of data; somewhere in the midst of that are the keys to delivering better content and better advertising. (These are becoming the same thing, a topic we'll be discussing at paidContent Live in New York on April 17).</p><p>As Battelle puts it in his post: "Twitter presents a massive search problem/opportunity. For example, Twitter's gotten better and better at what's called "entity extraction" identifying a person, place, or thing, then associating behaviors and attributes around that thing. Real time entity extraction crossed with signals like those described above is the Holy Grail."</p><p><a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-23/to-be-a-media-company-twitter-must-become-relevant">Keep reading...</a></p>