Twittering Your Home
Interest in the messaging service Twitter is clearly on the rise (see this Wall Street Journal article if you're not already familiar with it), and while most people are figuring out how to use Twitter for its intended purpose-social networking-I'd like to share …
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter has gone from niche toy to the dominant topic of tech blog chatter in a single week, riding its argued-for significance on mamamusings and its breakout visibility at the SXSW conference in Austin earlier this month, with the Wall Street Journal now explaining it to a mainstream readership. Not everyone is convinced: some bloggers publicly call the service inane and predict an imminent collapse once the novelty wears off.
Against that backdrop, this O'Reilly Network piece floats an unconfirmed but suggestive extension: pointing Twitter past its intended social-networking purpose and at home devices, using the message stream to connect and control hardware. It matters because it reframes Twitter from a destination site into a transport layer.
First-order effects
- Early adopters in the O'Reilly audience gain a template for wiring household devices into their Twitter streams, making the service a channel machines write to as well as people.
- Twitter's growth problem sharpens either way: every non-social use case like this adds load while skeptic bloggers are already forecasting the service's implosion.
Second-order effects
- If devices-as-tweeters catches on, rival status-messaging services face pressure to expose comparable programmatic access or cede the machine-to-machine niche entirely.
- Home-hardware tinkerers become a new constituency whose reliability demands exceed what social networking required of the service.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward short-message platforms doubling as middleware for connected environments, with the open question being whether a consumer social service can carry infrastructure-grade traffic without collapsing under it.
The trend: Consumer messaging services are drifting from human-only social tools toward general-purpose status channels that machines and applications also address.