I started posting to Twitter just over a year ago after many close friends spent concerted effort trying to convince me (and many others) to join. My first post was “Is this more than a fad?”, a thought most new Twitter users have (Note: It’s no fad - Twitter has resonated with many people and site traffic is staggering). I was initially skeptical of this service that looked like a cross between instant messaging and blogging - something people often refer to as ‘micro-blogging.’ Because Twitter only allows posts of 140 characters or less, you don’t have a lot of room to share your thoughts with that constraint. It didn’t take long for me to se the value in using Twitter to update and be updated by my friends and associates.

Posts are all over the map - from article links to what someone had for dinner to travel details - all sorts of interesting tidbits from people’s lives. This is content that generally doesn’t make it to a blog. These short updates belong much more to the world of instant messaging, but unlike the one-to-one focus of IM, Twitter is about one-to-many communication. One of the things I have found useful about Twitter besides following close friends is following people in my profession. The more I looked, the more interesting participants in the open source community I found on Twitter.

To highlight open source activity on Twitter, I have launched a new web application today called The Pulse of Open Source. This is the stream of collective consciousness from the open source community on Twitter. You can follow this stream by simply bookmarking the site and visiting regularly or by adding the RSS feed to your feed reader. You can also create a Twitter account and add the individuals you’d like to follow to your own Twitter friends list if you’d prefer. There is also a mobile version of the site for on-the-go viewing.

As of launch today, the site is following 87 people and I expect that number to grow substantially over time. Take a look at who we follow. If you are an active participant in the open source community and would like to be included in this stream of consciousness, instructions are on the site about how to participate. I’m hoping that my colleagues Jay and Matt will take the hint and join Twitter, too. 451 colleagues Nick Patience, Vishy Venugopalan, and Rachel Chalmers are on Twitter. You can also track our analyst releases using the service.

The initial idea for this site was based on a conversation I had at Open Source Think Tank 2008 with four other Twitter users - Ross Turk, Mark Hinkle, Reuven Cohen, aqnd Aaron Fulkerson. Thanks to these individuals for supporting the idea of a Twitter stream for open source stream activity, and to Michael Richardson for the programming work to make it all happen. While the posts may not always concern open source topics directly, you’ll get to learn about what your favorite open source developer had for breakfast, or what an open source vendor executive thinks about the latest industry news.

Take a look at The Pulse of Open Source.