2009 29
Gadgets that Twit themselves
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
- Image via CrunchBase
Today during a brainstorming session at Fon, David Garcia from customer care had an idea that we are likely going to implement for the Fonera 2.0 but that could in theory be expanded to many other gadgets. It is the concept of gadgets twitting themselves. Why would you want to get twits from a gadget? I know the idea sounds absurd at first but the Fonera 2.0 has a lot of things to twit about. The Fonera 2.0 is a social WiFi router that manages your relationship with the Web 2.0. If the Web 2.0 is all about user generated content (you can wake up now) then the Fonera 2.0 is about managing the transfer of that content. The Fonera 2.0 uploads your pictures to Facebook, Picasa, and/or Flickr, it downloads your files from Rapidshare and Megaupload, it uploads and downloads your torrents, it uploads your videos to Youtube, it offers a little extra bandwidth to your neighbors or people who pass by your home or office, it converts 3G signal to WiFi signal and it does all those things while your computer is off. On its own. So for a gadget that does a lot of things on its own but does not have a keyboard or a screen Twitting makes a lot of sense. Possible twits are “i just gave some bandwidth to a fonero”, “uploading pictures to Flickr”, “finished downloading torrent”, “finished sending 553 MB HD video to youtube”,”3G to Wifi conversion now on”, etc, etc, etc. In the case of the Fonera 2.0 twitter saves us from having a graphics card, a screen, a keyboard, many weird lights that mean all sorts of different things. But if that is what Twitter can do for the Fonera 2.0 imagine what it could do for many other gadgets: “your turkey is ready”, “your garden´s watered”, “your pool needs chlorine”, “you are running low on oil”…
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Angel on April 29, 2009 ·
Seems to me that sending an email to the owner would be much more practical. No one but me needs to know my pool needs chlorine or that i just finished downloading a file. Twitter is great for broadcasting messages but for a one to one comunications we have far better -and older- tools. In other scenarios, it might help. i.e. a twit telling evryone that the pictures you upload are aviable to see online.
Martin Varsavsky on April 29, 2009 ·
I can see cases in which my friends on twitter may want to know that I just sent a new video to Youtube, or a set of pictures to Flickr, but clearly the first interested person in following his/her fonero is the fonero/a themselves
JozhB on April 29, 2009 ·
Interesting, I agree with Angel though.
iamroberto on April 29, 2009 ·
Yeah, I know you can decide if your Twitter account is visible by everyone or is private, just wanted to know if that could be personalized on the Fonera software.
And after that, a new question came into my mind: would the Fonera 2.0 use…
a) your Twitter account and tweet to yourself,
b) a generic @fonera that send a DM to you or
c) a new one @whatever for every single Fonera?
Jose M Guardia on April 29, 2009 ·
Talk about gadget that tweet: http://i.gizmodo.com/5211135/man-builds-chair-that-tweets-his-farts-single+handedly-justifies-twitters-existence
parq on April 29, 2009 ·
Yes. It’s a great idea.
BTW there are (now) plants and cats on twitter.
Plants:
http://www.juliangallo.com.ar/2009/03/plantas-que-usan-twitter/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/26/twittering-plant-knows-ho_n_179542.html
http://enpiyama.wordpress.com/2009/04/04/%C2%BFy-si-las-plantas-usaran-twitter/
Cats:
http://twitter.com/GusAndPenny
http://ioanghip.googlepages.com/
Why not a Fonera?
Philippe Calvó on April 29, 2009 ·
Hmmmm…may be a future fonera 3.0 would be able to socialize with other foneras or other devices through an advanced twitter service? …So, for example, my fonera would listen to the twits of other foneras downloading media and decide what to download by itself? ..Or listening other foneras in the same geographical location twitting that it’s raining, my phonera could decide not to water my garden…
Wow! Amazing!
With services like twitter messages can be shared, email would not work for this.
Dani Santi on April 29, 2009 ·
Do not fonera 2.0 upload files to rapidshare or megaupload? why?
The idea seems really cool, more interesting if you add privacy to the twits
Andrea Grandi on April 29, 2009 ·
I had a similar idea 2 days ago and I proposed it in #fonosfera on IRC 😛
molgar on April 29, 2009 ·
And how about a fonera that accepts commands using twitter direct messages?
For instance, one could send the url of a torrent so that the fonera would begin downloading it, or even you could send a message that would make the fonera turn your house lights on.. you name it.
Gregor Einetter on April 30, 2009 ·
I think this is a great idea! I thought of a different example and did a brainstorming of how this could be used for toothbrushes http://gregor.typepad.com/archives/2009/04/lets-say-a-product-manager-at-a-dental-care-brand-would-get-the-internet-what-would-he-or-she-do.html
david lópez on April 30, 2009 ·
Another cool idea would be to have electric current sensors or gas sensors and have fonera 2.0 twit every time some threshold is reached: “you are spending too much power”…
Once you have your consumption metrics monitored in real time you could benchmark yourself against other neighbors other cities, other providers…..
lothar_m on May 3, 2009 ·
it seems a good idea but i hope you also implement it with other microblogging services (such as identi.ca).
Paul Pick-Aluas on May 4, 2009 ·
This is just the Web 2.0 re-incarnation of automated IMs. For instance, system administrators can have their routers or servers send alerts and the like via AIM/ICQ/SMS. These are all very useful, but hardly-used tools. It’s just too much communication clutter which is the ever-growing problem with the internet and our lives in general these days. The best invention-not-yet-invented is one that can effectively organize and prioritize all of this clutter.
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iamroberto on April 29, 2009 ·
Martin, the idea of the Fonera 2.0 twittering its statues is really cool… but I guess those updates could be set as private to the owner or a group of users?
Martin Varsavsky on April 29, 2009 ·
in twitter you can already decide if your twits are private, for everyone or only for your friends, but in the fonera software app you could decide what things you would like to twit about and what not