Until a decade ago all people wanted to explore and conquest was the world and its geographies. Now, it is to explore and conquest the internet. Of course, this is a much much much bigger domain than the latter, but people aren’t stopping to try. These days who doesn’t tweet? Even those who really doesn’t tweet, still tweets occasionally because Twitter is the plague of the 21st century (after Facebook). Normally on a regular day you would see all the personal updates stream on who is doing what and where and why. Recently, there have been statuses as such - Hacklab.toilet just flushed or mattsoffice tweeted that the temperature is 83.3° F or even BagelMaster is toasting. No one would be able to guess that these are actually the appliances talking – the toilet, toaster and an array of home light and temperature sensors. Seth Hardy’s twittering toilet @hacklab.toilet was an idea he came up with irritated at all the mundane things people put up on Twitter. It has 580 followers today. Then there is Hans Scharler who created his twittering toaster @mytoaster and now has 200 followers. Inspired by this, Matthew Morey, an engineer at Texas Instruments, created his own twittering appliances by finding a way to get the temperature and ighting of his single-family home in Houston on Twitter. He could also send commands to his appliances via Twitter by sending a reply with words such ‘@MattsOffice light on’ or ‘@MattsOffice light off’ to turn on or off the light at his desk.

Two companies Adafruit and ioBridge created modules for people or do-it-yourselfers who wanted to get their appliances tweeting. Adafruit Industries’ hardware kit helped DIYers get their appliances tweeting through Tweet-a-watt. The $90 open source allowed users post the daily energy consumption of their refrigerator or TV set to a
Twitter account. The control module from ioBridge, available for $88 can bring most devices online and you don’t need to worry too much about the technicalities of programming or electronics to hook it up. Some of these guys are also putting up a detailed description of how to get your home appliances to tweet on their websites. So now, literally anyyyyything you want to do or you are doing or you wish you were, can be tweeting in virtual space thanks to some guys at home who had no dates on a Saturday night. Good fun.

[Wired]