Wednesday, 27 January 2010
Humans tweet and automated computer scripts tweet, but what about machines, what if they joined in? Would the automatic sharing of a virtualisation of mechanical events and real-time sensor data be a grand version of the Turing test or just an anthropomorphism of hardware?
Imaging you're running late for a train. You could glance at the twitter feed for your line and see real time updates from each train; "Just left Birmingham, 5 minutes late, four coaches.." In your feed would be your personal video recorder tweeting that it's about to record something. You realise you wanted to record a program, so you @reply to it and the program will be waiting for you when you get home.
From a user's point of view getting information from a twittering machine has several advantages. Many twitter feeds can be monitored at once. No need to run different apps on your iPhone to check the time of your taxi, train and plane when setting out on a journey. Just follow them on twitter to get all the updates together. Tweets are public and accessible from an array of devices and many users will probably have a twitter client running anyway.
The future is already here. Check out my Twitter list of machines that are tweeting right now, ranging from clocks and telescopes to bathroom scales and a cat flap.
