James Galvin

Justin Mason has just launched Irish Pulse. An aggregator for Irish Twitter users.
I think it is a nice tool. It lets me see what other Irish people are saying (beyond the 70 or so that I follow). It shows me replies that don’t show up in my feed, and I’m guessing that it also shows a bunch of mysterious missing tweets, because I’m sure I don’t see half of this stuff that I should be getting.

One concern for me is that the pure convenience of an aggregator like this might discourage new people from joining the conversation. I originally signed up to Twitter to follow breaking news and tap into the information that is out there (e.g., Blacknight downtime over Christmas). By actually immersing myself into the stream of consciousness, joining Twitter, adding all of these people that I “kind of” knew, the system came to life and suddenly it all made sense.

Irish Pulse is like reading an IRC log without actually being in the channel, a bunch of uninteresting one-liners from faceless people with stupid names, with the occasional nugget of value here and there. Irish Pulse collapses Twitterspace, flattening it into the log of an IRC channel during a netsplit (a lot of the participants can’t really see each other). People who hate Twitter are not going to change their minds. People who aren’t familiar with Twitter, or are considering creating an account might feel that this meets their needs, and miss out on Twitter’s extra dimensions.

I like Irish Pulse, and I recommend that everyone does what Justin suggests: “read it: bookmark and take a look now and again.” It gives you an opportunity to step out of the crowd for a moment and take a look around from the balcony. But if you haven’t yet created a Twitter account and seen it from the inside, then I would advise you not to rely on Irish Pulse as anything more than another buzz aggregator.