It’s no secret that Twitter tends to be my newswire. And I’m not the only one. Portland’s own Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read/Write Web goes so far as to say, “Twitter is paying my rent.”
To me and many others, Twitter is the AP wire. It’s where I hear about stuff first.
In fact, Twitter is part of the reason I started Silicon Florist. Because I just saw so much happening out there in our fair city.
For the uninitiated and perhaps intimidated, it is important to note that the beauty of Twitter is its clean and nearly foolproof opt-in setup. Getting spam? Quit following. Done. Want to know who’s following your news? Just look. There they are.
Doesn’t get much cleaner than that.
So, I thought it might be helpful to highlight a by-no-means-exhaustive smattering of the Portland organizations and events that I am following on Twitter as a way to stay up-to-date with Rose City happenings. (For the complete list of whom I follow, visit Twitter.)
If I were you, I’d consider following the following Portland-area startups on Twitter:
- Grabb.it
- Ignite Portland
- NetworthIQ
- PDX Social Media
- Planet Argon
- Portland Adobe Developer User Group
- Silicon Florist
And then, there are a number of Portland-area startups who have employees on Twitter. (Which, honestly, is almost better than a company on Twitter. In the same way that, by and large, employee blogs are far more interesting than corporate blogs.)
Some of those startups are:
Finally, it isn’t lost on me that I may not be following all the people, companies, and groups that I should be following.
So, I’m asking you to enlighten me.
If you want me (and other Silicon Florist readers) to follow your Silicon Forest startup on Twitter, please feel free to add your Twitter identity to the comments, below. (I’ve refrained from posting a list of individual Portlanders here. But if you want more people following you, feel free to add your Twitter account to the comments, as well.)
If the list gets long enough, I might have to work on publishing a Portland-centric “who to follow on Twitter” list.
Comments are closed.
Hey cool, Google Alerts just pulled this for me this morning. Thanks for the mention (Amplify Interactive)!
My twitter is: ChristianBk
In all the excitement – I totally forgot to post my Twitter ID. http://twitter.com/blizzle
Rick,
Thanks for linking to Amplify in your post. Twitter is obviously very exciting, and between following you & using twitterwhere – I have been able to tap into some exciting people & happenings here in PDX. My favorite is finding other people I already know on Twitter – but wouldn’t have thought to look them up or ask them for their ID.
[…] by a post over at Silicon Florist about following local people on Twitter, I investigated whether it was possible to follow someone […]
@Matt: Wow! Very cool! So cool, apparently, that I am going to end every sentence in exclamation points!
In all seriousness, that is simply brilliant. I’ve already written up the post on it, and I’m looking forward to discovering a whole bunch of new Portland Twitter types.
Thanks very much for taking the time to build that. I think you’re going to find a number of folks very happy with that app.
[…] Silicon Florist Rose City + Silicon Forest « Twitter on Portland, Portland on Twitter […]
Don’t forget me! http://twitter.com/jabancroft
And there’s also this one I set up:
http://twitter.com/IntelSoftware
Inspired by your post, I went ahead and made a Twitter aggregator that lets you create RSS feeds of Tweets from a specific location. I call it TwitterWhere. It works based off of the public timeline, so if anyone doesn’t show up there (or, if their location isn’t valid), it won’t show up in my app’s feed. I just fired it up so give it a few hours to collect a good set of aggregated data…
http://twitterwhere.mattking.org