A recent article by New York Times’s Nick Bilton asks: is Twitter a technology company or a media company? Until recently, the answer was easy—Twitter is a technology company, full stop. Twitter creates the technology platform, but its users are the ones who produce the content (i.e., the media) distributed over it. To analogize, Twitter is like the television manufacturer, while its users are like NBC, ABC, and Comedy Central. No one thinks of Panasonic as a media company, and they shouldn’t have thought of Twitter that way either…but that might be changing.

It’s worth considering how powerful Twitter could become acting as, in essence, a publisher of content.

Twitter dipped its toe into the content realm recently when it created its own page dedicated to NASCAR, curating tweets relevant to Ricky Bobby, et al. and placing them in their own dedicated location. And now it is doing the same with the Olympics.

The experiment has had its hiccups, but it’s worth considering how powerful Twitter could become acting as, in essence, a publisher of content. It’s a trend that could become relevant to professional service providers. JD Supra and others do a great job curating legal content, but it’s interesting to think about what a Twitter page on white-collar crime or law schools or any other legal topic might look like, and what it could do for marketers in those fields. What legal-oriented subject area would you like to see Twitter tackle first? Or would you prefer it to remain exclusively a technology company, and leave the content to the rest of us?