At the journalism conference at Central Connecticut State University, I told one of the organizers that I had heard about the conference through Twitter. She was pleased to hear that and mentioned it in part of the introduction. Twitter is changing the way people gather news. As I sat there, it occurred to me, “I Get My News on Twitter”.

When major events, or even minor events happen, I usually hear about it first on Twitter. Yesterday, Colin McEnroe talked about Twitter on his radio show, and I heard about that via Twitter. I heard about the attacks in Mumbai via Twitter. When there have been earthquakes or tornados, I’ve heard about that first from Twitter.

One problem is that I currently follow over 900 people on Twitter. It can be hard to keep them straight. One tool that I used to try and help with this is FriendFeed. FriendFeed aggregates information from Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Identi.ca, Flickr, and many other services. Beyond that, it allows you to set up rooms where people can gather. I’ve set up rooms for various groups that I’m part of and that has been helpful.

Another site that I’ve really liked recently is My Social Chatter. It brings up a Twitter screen in half the page and a FriendFeed screen in the other half. Every two minutes it refreshes.

It was watching the FriendFeed section of MySocialChatter, that I learned about PeopleBrowsr. When I first started playing with it last night, it was very slow, perhaps because Robert Scoble had just mentioned it. It is still listed as being in Alpha testing; as I write this, it is listed as version 0.691.

This morning, I went back, and started to use it to tag people that I know from EntreCard. It was very easy to find a lot of friends from EntreCard on Twitter using PeopleBrowsr and to tag them. Unfortunately, I haven’t found an easy way to see a stream of all the people with a specific tag. I hope this is coming soon.

As I write this blog post and continue to test PeopleBrowsr and post tweets about it, I received a message from NutureGirl about PeopleBrowsr being in Alpha and a new version coming soon. In a subsequent Tweet, she talks about PeopleBrowsr as one of her clients. She describes herself as a ‘Community Flow Catalyst’; a great title. If the folks launching PeopleBrowsr have a ‘Community Flow Catalyst’ working for them on Thanksgiving morning, while they are still in beta, I have very high hopes for the project. Other sites should learn from PeoleBrowsr and make sure they have ‘Community Flow Catalysts’ in from the very beginning.

Another site that I’m keeping an eye on is tarpipe.com. Unlike PeopleBrowsr, they claim to already in be in Beta, but their beta seems much less reliable than PeopleBrowsr’s Alpha. What I like about tarpipe is that it uses OpenID for authentication. However, the signup process just isn’t working, at least for me. I’ll check it again some other day.

On the topic of OpenID, many people are lauding the Obama administration for including OpenID support on change.gov. I’m also very excited about it. They are using intensedebate to handle the OpenID authentication. The one problem I have is that intensedebate does not appear to fully support OpenID v 2.0.

In particular, OpenID v 2.0 supports xri. So, using one of my inames identities, I can log into sites that support OpenId v 2.0. The two inames identities that I use are =aldon.hynes and @ahynes1. They use different inames services, but what is really cool is that if the site supports OpenID V 2.0, like identi.ca does, then I can login simply as @ahynes1. Pretty cool for microblogging services. I just wish I could login a =aldon.hynes on Change.gov