This week, The New York Times publicly launched Vellum, an experiment that creates a reading layer over your Twitter feed and flips its focus.

Vellum focuses on the shared content of a tweet, treating shared links, with their full titles and descriptions, as primary content and tweeted commentary as secondary content.

Links are ranked by how often they are shared by those you follow on Twitter.  The goal is to present the linked content your friends and colleagues are discussing most in a noise-free way and to promote the easy discovery of content.

The NYTLab blog explains the recent share:

Vellum was built as a quick experiment, but as we and other groups within The New York Times have been using it over the past few months, it has proven to be an invaluable tool for using Twitter as a content discovery interface.

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