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:
- Create a Twitter account for the entity. Take for example, Silicon Florist.
- Follow the folks whom you would like to participate in the flow of the conversation.
- 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.