16 Feb 5 Interesting Uses of Twitter
Although I have over 800 followers on Twitter, I would not call myself an avid Twitteror(er). I rarely update and sporadically read tweets. This is not for a lack of wanting to participate, it’s just that once I get started it’s hard to stop and I have things to do. With that said, I do find myself spending a lot of time tracking all of the various applications built on top of or inspired by Twitter – of which there are many.
Below are some cool and interesting takes/hacks/modifications of the Twitter concept that I’ve come across over the past year and a half. No rhyme of reason why I’ve listed them, I just like ‘em.
Twitterizing non-humans:
I’m not talking cartoons characters either. I’m talking about real inanimate things or living things that are unable to tweet on their own.
- The best example and probably best known is the Mars Phoenix Twitter project. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory did a great job in using Twitter to describe the lander’s point of view when it made its Mars landing on May 25, 2008:
Even more interesting were the updates given by the Mars lander while cruising around the surface:
These updates were obviously done by someone sitting comfortably at NASA somewhere. Not to take away anything from the experience, but it would have been interesting for the lander itself to generate its own tweets in real time – like the way the Tower Bridge in London does.
- About a year ago, Tom Armitage figured out a way to use an existing data source to bring Twitter life to the Tower Bridge.
It doesn’t do much more than that, but I think this serves as a great starting point in getting people thinking about ways to use various data sets and Twitter in useful (or perhaps not so useful) and unusual ways. For example, airlines could use this method to keep everyone up-to-date via Twitter as to the location and schedule of its planes. Each plane could get its own Twitter account. You would be able to subscribe to that plane’s Twitter feed directly from the airline’s site or Orbitz or wherever. The data exists, shouldn’t be too difficult to feed it into Twitter. Don’t know if the airlines are already doing this, but, if not, there’s an idea for you.
So those are inanimate objects, the next logical step would be to give the gift of Twitter to animated things. To this end, Botanicalls allows your plants to Tweet you when they are in need of water and, get this, will thank you when it’s happy. Cool and spooky at the same time. I don’t have much to add to this, except that it looks like Botanicalls will be a nice accompaniment to the Easy Bloom USB plant sensor I bought my wife last christmas. Excellent, more stuff for me! I mean, her.
h8ter – I really like this concept. People who know me will know why. It looks like Twitter and has some of the same functionality of Twitter (you can set up a profile and post short messages) – but this ain’t Twitter:
h8ter is a service for malcontents, hostiles and haters to communicate and stay hateful through the exchange of quick, malicious answers to one simple question: What do you hate?
Could you ask for anything more? Brilliant. Now, unlike the next example, h8ter does not link into the larger Twitter community. What is said in h8ter, stays in h8ter. Which is comforting, given some of the things said on the site.
Another example of one of these Twitter-like clones is SecretTweet. Unlike h8ter, SecretTweet pushes content directly to Twitter. An added twist is that the site serves as an anonymizer as well. You tweet/post your secrets onto the site and it is then anonymously added to SecretTweet’s Twitter stream for its followers to see.
How could this approach be of any use to anyone? Well, you could build your own little walled-off piece of the Twitterverse where users would feel comfortable saying certain things that they wouldn’t want broadcasted under their name to the entire universe. These same people would post in the walled-off Twitterville with the knowledge that their issue/message could be of some use and benefit to someone beyond the wall. The site posts the message internally for its community to respond to, and then posts it outside of its walls anonymously for the rest of the world to see and respond to (assuming the content’s originator agrees to have it pushed out). The originator of the post benefits from having a close and closed group of trusted people offer their insights on issues that may be private in nature (could be health or business related, or something) and then the post gets another round of feedback anonymously when it hits the wider Tweeterverse. Just an idea, haven’t fleshed it out yet, but I do see some possibilities here.
Twitter Clones
And I’m not talking about Identica or Plurk. I don’t know what you’d call these types of closed-off Twitter-like sites that may or may not feed into the wider Twitterverse. Twitterburbs? Twittersatellites? Twittervilles? I dunno, but I like ‘em. Here are a couple that you may or may not have heard of:
I’m always interested in hearing about how Twitter and other apps are being twisted up and molded to meet various needs. I’ve listed two general buckets where I’ve seen some interesting Twitter developments over the past year and a half – what would you add?
