Impressed by the Pulse of PDX tool that gives anyone—whether they use Twitter or not—a view into what Portland-based Twitter types are saying, Raven Zachary saw an opportunity to provide a similar view into what the Open Source proponents are saying on Twitter.
The result? The Pulse of Open Source.
Lisa Hoover of Download Squad sees it as a stab at Twitter groups and deems the Pulse concept—appropriately—“cool”:
Twitter doesn’t have a grouping feature yet (even though they said 7 months ago it was “at the top of their list”) but that hasn’t stopped a group of open source aficionados from finding a way to form one anyway. Five Twitterers including SourceForge’s Ross Turk and open source analyst extraordinaire Raven Zachary launched The Pulse of Open Source today, calling it a “collective stream of consciousness from the open source community.” We just call it “cool.”
And Portland’s Marshall Kirkpatrick takes the concept even further in his Read/Write Web coverage of the Pulse concept:
With a little editorial judgment, this model could work well for any number of niche topics. Integration to display recent bookmarks on social bookmarking sites and blog posts wouldn’t be difficult either. Think of it as an industry-centric version of social lifestreaming, instead of a user centric one as is more common these days. I think both models are fascinating.
Wouldn’t that be interesting? I think so. And I see Portland continuing to innovate on how Twitter, as a platform, will be used.
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Wow, very cool! Who would have imagined that the little spark of an idea that Scott Kveton blogged, and I hacked on (before Michael made it, you know, actually work well 😉 ) would grow into something this big!
I always thought that it would be great to apply this to other communities/affinity groups. I’ve got a few rolling around in my head that I’d like to do at some point.
Yay Portland Geeks! 🙂
The concepts of taking user centric ideology (which is a very “web 1.0” idea) and repurposing it as a social or groupthink tool just shows over and over again that we want more information about many things at once and not the tired old “here is something cool now use it our way” mentality. Both Pulse of PDX and Pulse of Open Source are viable ideas simply because we the users don’t want user centric anymore. We want open tools to use our way. Very cool to see this site launch to keep the real movers and shakers of the world of OSS in view and focused on what’s happening.