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Category: Pulse

Tweetpeek: Create your own Twitter-based “Pulse of (whatever)”

Rick Turoczy on March 11, 2008

Arguably one of the most popular Twitter-powered tools in Twitter-happy Portland, Pulse of PDX has had a lot of folks thinking about how to broadcast their own “group-think,” exposing the conversations of Twitter to a much broader audience. Pulse of Open Source is another great—and popular—example.

And so, maybe, you’re interested in doing the same thing by creating your own Pulse of… well, whatever. But, problem being you’re not really in command of the skills it would take to get the Twitter api to bend to your will.

I hear you, brother and/or sister. And that’s why I’m glad to have found Portland’s newest Twitter-based tool, Tweetpeek.

Tweetpeek is designed to help anyone build a pulse-of-anything widget in a few easy steps:

  1. Create a Twitter account for the entity. Take for example, Silicon Florist.
  2. Follow the folks whom you would like to participate in the flow of the conversation.
  3. Head over to Tweetpeek and tell it the name of the Twitter account you created.

And voila! You now have a site or widget to which you can point anyone, Twitter user or not (for shame!).

http://siliconflorist.tweetpeek.com/widget/

That’s right, my friend, you’re now in the business of building api-driven widgets. Just like that.

Tweetpeek was a joint project of Portland’s Michael Richardson and Josh Pyles. The current version is a very early, yet highly functional, build. Even if you’re not interested in building a pulse, I’d encourage you to spend some time with Tweetpeek, because I’m positive that you’ll immediately conjure up some applications for it.

For more information or to build your own, visit Tweetpeek.

Monitoring the pulse of Open Source

Rick Turoczy on February 25, 2008

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.