Information Technology Dark Side

Six years ago I was sitting at a table with some guys from SeeBeyond, an SOA/EAI vendor that has since been acquired by Sun. I told one of them, a sales engineer, that I thought it would be really cool if they had some sort of SeeBeyond Lite that was free for consumers to use for things like home automation, etc. He looked at me like I was crazy. I tried to explain why I thought a service bus for the home would be useful, but he took a long drag on his beer and pretended to be distracted by an overheard comment about the price of SeeBeyond stock.

Sigh. He had pegged me as a nerd and moved on.

Today, a few people are using Twitter for exactly what I wanted SeeBeyond Lite for, and I think it’s brilliant. There are houseplants that send you tweets when they are thirsty, houses that obey commands you send from twitter, and just a few days ago yours truly (with Atomic Object) launched uladoo.com, a site that lets you make charts online just by tweeting to @uladoo.

Boy, do I ever want to get those houseplants talking to uladoo!

I think this new application of twitter to send messages, not just to people followers, but to devices and services is then next incarnation of twitter. Twitter 2.0 isn’t a new version of Twitter – it’s a new version of what we use it for.

Twitter is the perfect service bus for short messages with no security requirements. It’s a Public ServeUs Bus! Go ahead, call it a PSUB. It’s freaking awesome! The twitter API is so easy to use creating adapters at either end is almost trivial. Any data you can fit in 140 characters can be sent to any receiver either through a pub-sub model or point-to-point.

Here are a few random ideas I’ve had about how Twitter could be used as data collection/aggregation/distribution service:

Traffic data collection: you know those things in the road that count cars? What if they just tweeted the time and gps coordinates every time a car came by? You could create all sorts of aggregations of this data by combining the twitter search api with animated maps to show traffic flow in a city.

Home weather stations that tweet their data along with their location. There are all sorts of weather geeks out there who would do all sorts of stuff with this.

Birdwatching. Combine twitpic and gps location with a twitter account that aggregates the data and you’ve got a mobile bird-watching application (someone needs to figure out how to tether an iPhone to a digital SLR for this one)

Cheap mobile devices that only send tweets. These aren’t for consumers – they’re just for other devices. Something you can add to a camera, or a weather station, or whatever you want, so that it can send messages anywhere there is mobile service.

Auctions by twitter. People bid with tweets, while ebay or something like it manages the auction at the other end.

Open source exit poll data. Imagine pollsters carrying devices that tweet exit poll data as they collect it. Anyone can analyze it, mash it up, do what they what, with a pretty reasonable data lag.

Collecting feedback. Yesterday Guy Kawasaki asked his followers which logo they liked better over twitter. I don’t know how he processed the results, but they could have been tied to a charting application (uladoo will support this soon) that let Guy and anyone else who cared see the results as they came in.

One of the coolest things about collecting data using twitter as a bus is the openness of it all. If one guy makes a device that tweets weather information, another guy might make an application that makes that weather data meaningful in a new way, like creating animated wind charts for his science fair project.

It’s a way of creating, collecting, and sharing data that is essentially open source. Open source data thanks to Twitter 2.0, the new Public Service Bus.

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