Sometimes it helps to draw a picture to summarize where these big companies are going. Because you can't evaluate them as static things. They're in motion.
Note that of course a lot of other companies are going there too. But I don't have a good feeling for how they get there. Twitter and Apple, that's kind of obvious. Apple has their hooks in distribution of entertainment. And Twitter has interactivity. But you shouldn't forget that the TV networks are already, in a sense, there. They are the incumbents. They could respond like Nokia and Blackberry, and by the time they realize their products have no future, they could already be losing huge business to the upstarts. Or they could prepare by starting to build their own interactive networks to hook into their television programming.
For more, see my previous post.
Checkbox news is an obvious idea, so don't try to patent it.
Hypercamp is on the path too.