A little over a week ago, my good friend Luke Fretwell stopped by my office to chat about this idea that he had to aggregate all the feeds from the social media accounts of the US Government in one place. Various arms of the federal government have been signing up for things like Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube at a rapid pace. Luke thought it would be cool to be able to follow all of those feeds from the same place. Intrigued, we sat down for a couple hours and put together GovFresh.com as an early prototype. We’re using WordPress as a framework for FriendFeed widgets, so it’s pretty light on features right now, but you can already see the potential. We spent the last week tweaking things here and there, but mostly just mentioning it to a few people on Twitter and what-not. Since then, our traffic has almost doubled every day and we’re trying to figure out what to do next (cast your votes here). I have to say, even I’m surprised at how quickly this is catching on, especially given how simple it is and how little time we put into it. Much of the credit goes to Luke for the excellent design and for seeding it to the right people on Twitter, but the moral of the story is the same: if you want to start something, don’t wait for permission or put together a committee, just do it. I’m excited to see what comes from this and I’d love to hear what you think. Tell me in the comments.
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