Twitter's Event Parrot News Service Sends Updates Via Direct Message

Twitter is a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but for many of us it's primarily a news source. Follow your favorite newspapers, newsmakers, blogs and writers and you'll have a constantly updating feed of the stories and opinions you're interested in. Now, it looks like Twitter is launching a new service devoted to sending you news updates itself, dropping them directly into your Direct Message box with a new account called Event Parrot.

There's still no official confirmation that @eventparrot is a product of Twitter's own offices, but several signs all but confirm this is the company's own creation. First, there's the new accounts bio, which reads extremely similar to previous "Twitter experiment" @MagicRecs, designed to alert you when people you follow start following a new account. Then there's the fact that some of the company's top employees were the first to follow the account and recommend it online.

We started following @eventparrot last night—thanks to a recommendation from @MagicRecs—but still haven't received any messages from the new service. It's an interesting idea, and if Twitter can deliver lightning fast news updates we'll stick with it, but at the same time, this new account doesn't have the same appeal as @MagicRecs, which helped expand your Twitter experience instead of just re-hashing something the social network already does pretty well.