Is Home Automation The Real Point To Twitter?
Twitter is all over the blogosphere at the moment, as geeks-a-plenty revel in the kind of extreme disclosure previously only experienced by naked ladies on pay-per-view webcams. Personally I'm not sure there's an audience for my own brand of "thinking about scratching my nose" updates, so I'll probably remain Twitter-less... or at least that's what I thought up until reading Gordon Meyer's account of how he uses Twitter's focused message delivery to keep up to date with the activities of his home automation setup.
With a custom interface between a dedicated Twitter house account and the XTension automation software Gordon uses, actions such as someone walking into range of a PIR sensor trigger a message that is sent to his email account or cellphone, depending on how he's told Twitter that he'd like to be notified.
He's got future plans for it, too, including the possibility of setting up a webcam on his front porch and having Twitter send a TinyUrl link to wherever he is when someone pays a visit. Y'know, for the first time I'm actually thinking of signing up...