Raven and Michael released their Pulse of Open Source Twitter aggregator this morning. Essentially, they’ve hand picked open source people who Twitter and aggregated their Tweats into one page, with history.
This is like a “planet” site for blogs, and it’s fun for Twitter drive-by readings. You can also think of it as a river of Twitter. Whatever metaphor you like, the point is that it’s a grouping of Twitter people.
The obvious things to do are find new people to follow and then use it as a quick way to scroll through the general vibe of the open source community at any given time. I’m sure PR and AR people would benefit from using it. The second use-case is nice because it means you don’t actually have to subscribe to people in Twitter, you can just dive into a stream of them as needed.
As I suggested to Raven, there seems to be some juju to be had with integrating pule sites like this with eventtrack.info or even the more general #hashtags. For me, sites like PulseOfOpenSource.com aren’t so good for hour-by-hour tracking, but more so for reporting and searching - for research. I’m just jim-dandy with the Twitter river - Twitter itself! - folks I have setup. BUT, I don’t really see Twitter the company doing much more when it comes to searching, reporting, and other research-y things: I’m betting they’ll just focus on the core platform and let the already bumping application community that builds on Twitter.
To that end, I’m always excited to see new applications on-top of Twitter itself, so it’ll be fun to keep tabs on what happens with this new site.
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