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I discover real-time news far more often on Facebook than on Google News or a regular Google search.

With the evolution of social media that includes blogging, Facebook, and Twitter, who and how information is delivered has changed tremendously. The landscape for news is a different place, and people have to accept that.

Twitter and Facebook are brilliant tools, the journalistic uses of which are still being plumbed. They are great for disseminating interesting material. They are useful for gathering information, including from places that are inaccessible.

There is no better source of real-time news than Twitter. With the constant sharing of news and information, if you're an active Twitter user, there's nothing happening, big or small, that you won't know right away.

One thing we seem to be missing is that just as we no longer search for the news, the news finds us today (e.g. this article found me) we will no longer search for products and services, rather we will look to our social graph to what products and services they like and don't like.

All sorts of factors contribute to what Facebook or Twitter present in a feed, or what Google or Bing show us in search results. Our expectation is that those intermediaries will provide open conduits to others' content and that the variables in their processes just help yield the information we find most relevant.

With the growing reliance on social media, we no longer search for news, or the products and services we wish to buy. Instead they are being pushed to us by friends, acquaintances and business colleagues.

Twitter has a several-hour advantage in getting information.

Twitter is the first information that I ingest in the morning. When there are important things happening, friends of mine who follow news feeds will report on it, so I find out about most major news on Twitter.

Thanks to social media such as Facebook and Twitter, a far wider range of people take part in gathering, filtering and distributing news.