In this post, I’ll share some of my favorite examples of this trend like the Chandra X-Ray observatory that posts its location as it circles the globe every 20 minutes or so.
While knowing where a satellite is interesting, some examples that might be more helpful are Red Jets automatic posting of the arrival and departure of their ferries. Sydney Australia posts the traffic issues for the entire city and further sub-divides that world status into sections of the city like (Sydney South West). Sydney is not alone, other cities are starting to do the same from Bangkok to Orlando.
Ever wondered what that song title is you just heard on the radio or at a bar, well many bars and radio stations are now automatically posting the songs they are playing. The Internet Radio or the Belgium station Radioo are great examples of this trend. Want to know what games your friends are playing, Xbox can now post its status for others to track. One last note of interest, you may not want all these sensors in your time line, try using the GET command on Twitter. That will allow you to get the last status of an account for example: "GET InternetRadio".
While getting status of satellites, traffic or radio stations is interesting, it holds nothing to the creativity of a group of students at Olin College who hooked up their laundry room to twitter to get the status of their washers and dryers.
All of these things are natural uses of Twitter’s platform and they illustrate its flexibility and potential. I’m very intrigued to see how people will continue to wire machines and humans into Twitter’s Global Conversation.
5 comments:
I like the idea, EXCEPT for this one:
http://twitter.com/junkies_jp
Also, that first one is updating every 10 minutes or so. That's why the most recent was 3 minutes ago, then 13, then 23, then 33, then 43...
Don't forget @towerbridge!
there is always @unix_quote a tie-in to the unix program fortune that posts quotes 3 times a day
Effective distribution of time-sensitive information is about quickly getting knowledge to the people who need it without creating "information noise" in the process. For real-time alerts, like those published to the web by Washington State Ferries, I feel that Twitter offers a great syndication platform. Twitter distributes short, time-sensitive bulletins to a niche audience (e.g. ferry commuters) via the hardware platform of the subscriber's choice (PC, iPhone, BlackBerry, SMS, etc.). I created the @wsferries Twitter feed as a demonstration of this technique. If you live in the Puget Sound area and commute by ferry, you might find it useful.
In the last week since I first started looking at twitter, I have integrated it into our library system. I only have a few automated feeds at the moment, but I hope that by the end of the week I'll have a few more that should be really useful. Right now it automatically tweets about the most recently checked out "New Book", Usage stats of our printers (trying to guilt people in to being greener), random favorite quotes of staff members (only when the library is 'bored'). I've also added the ability for our patrons to recommend books on their own twitter accounts with the click of a button. http://www.twitter.com/wcctoddlibrary/
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