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Did Chris Brogan just steal my PULSE?!

Did Chris Brogan just steal my metaphor of Twitter to a pulse in answering his own question? No attribution!

My answer: it gives the web a pulse, a voice, and connects me to your brilliance when I need it. You are the value.
29 minutes ago from txt

I jest. You know, the great minds thing. Since I caught the Twitter bug, I have been trying to answer the question "What is it? What does it do for me?" Recently I cemented my thoughts in Can you rely on Twitter for breaking news? Ultimately, I decided to explain Twitter as a pulse. Generally speaking, the more focused the people you follow are on a subject matter coupled with a larger number of those people, the more rapidly you will know about matters concerning that subject.

For example, If you follow a whole bunch of people who are really obsessed with dry ice and that’s all they really talk about, then you will know through Twitter anything that happens in the field of dry ice as quickly as it becomes public.

If you follow random people who all talk about different things, you’ll get noise but you will still get a feeling, a sense, of the commonalities of those people, a pulse. In my case, I follow:

  1. friends and family
  2. people in Knoxville
  3. some breaking news sources
  4. the movers and shakers in the technology world
  5. ColdFusion and PHP developers (yeah yeah…some of you .NET guys too)

As Chris Brogan and I came to the same conclusion, I believe more and more people will begin explaining Twitter as a pulse on a topic even if that topic is the world.

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