Spam your friends!
Count me among the many who just don’t get Twitter - and it’s not like I’m not one who isn’t a likely candidate either. I mean, hey, I blog, so already I’m comfortable with the idea that I’m uselessly shouting my thoughts out into the ether. There’s been a WSJ article that’s been making the rounds that pretty much sums up my feelings about Twitter - I don’t care what other people are eating for dinner, and why should I presume that they care about my dinner choice?
That said, there have been some Twitter-related bits & pieces that have been floating around lately of which I could easily see myself taking advantage. Jacqui at Ars points to an O’Reilly Mac DevCenter article (without actually putting in the link) that explains a method of using Twitter in automating your home. As home automation is something I want to play with (once I have a home), this looks pretty interesting.
In other related news, while I can’t just see the point of Twitter (yes, there is such a thing as too much information), Dodgeball.com seems to make more sense to me - if you’re out barhopping or whatever, send up the flag for your friends to find you. Not that I do that much anymore, but it certainly makes more sense to me…
I’ve tried Twitter twice to see what all the fussin’ is about. Both times Firefox would hang. Sounds dumb anyway.
As for the home automation - oh, my head. I’d become an obsessive, paranoid freak in no time. “Someone’s at the door!” Huh? Why?! What are they doing there?!! I’m calling the cops!!!
Only thing I am keeping an eye on in terms of future needs/networking is my iTunes library. I’ve got it set up on a dedicated RAID (with DVD backups just in case), but I don’t want to push those drive into an early grave because I’m playing back hours of music from them all the time. Seems to me that I need the RAID for long-term storage and an “active” drive that I copy everything to and use for actual playback, because in the long run I would like to see my future home be wired in every useful room for iTunes sharing. Just add cheap old computers, and off you go. Networked music bliss in every room, all feeding off one server.
It’s funny how we moved from mainframe/terminal to home computer, and now seem to be inching back towards that old model. In fact one of the hightlights, for me, of this iTunes sharing thing would be digging up machines to run iTunes in various rooms. A laptop here, an old iMac there. There’s articles out there regarding new uses for old VT100 terminals…
hmmm….
Comment by Jim — 3/26/2007 @ 9:46 am
Yeah, I hear you Jim - the potential for paranoid freakout is there. After having been broken into at my last place though, I like the thought of knowing that you can use home automation to at least turn the lights on automatically, if not just be able to have photo captures of whoever is at the door.
It’s not like I’m going to be getting into it anytime soon, but I like the concepts that this guy has been building out of Twitter. The only potential use that I can see getting out of the service - unless some other enterprising parties think other things up - that’s for sure.
As for media server(s), that’s something I’d like to get into as well. Our one bedroom apartment pretty much precludes playing around with that anytime soon on that too though.
Comment by Brian — 4/8/2007 @ 12:20 pm