Even Laundry Rooms Twitter Now

Even laundry rooms, like this one at Olin College Twitter now, so are you still waiting to create your own Twitter account?

When two washers, two dryers and a condom machine create content autonomously, broadcasting to the world their temporal status, available, unavailable, I smile because we are finally beginning to see a very granular point of view with web content.

Twitter is about “now” time statements. So LaundryRoom needs to continually ping their followers with updates, but they only ping when the status of a machine changes. The machine has a location that must be described in order to find it and the moment in time in which the machine status changes is important because as everyone knows, washing and drying machines are quite popular in large buildings full of students and you need to be on the ball to get a machine before others do. In this regard, Twitter is a great system to connect with a Laundry Room and a group of student followers.

Micro content regarding the status of machines is beginning to show up everywhere, from parking meters to washing machines, so why are humans so slow to adopt a more systematic organizational structure for geo-temporal tagging their own lives? We tag here and we tag there, and some systems add meta data for us, but overall we don’t yet use a uniform system for tagging our daily interactions with technology on a geo-temporal basis. The reason why this is such an important point to understand is because by adding Time and Place to our electronic trails, we can access our personal history and share what we learned on the journey. We might also pull other real or virtual people into conversations if we enable others to see where we are, when we are there. If my phone broadcasts my GPS signal and tells my friends automatically “hey, come visit me at this location”, even if I’m in a virtual world like SecondLife, the possibilities created are interesting to ponder.

So where Dodgeball has mostly failed to live up to the concept, perhaps other newer, simpler, more automated systems of geo-temporal “shouting” which work at a more fundamental web standards level, can gain some traction in the market and help us all connect more. Or we might simply want to wash our clothes and need to know when a machine is available in our dorm without interrupting our PS3 gaming to walk down the hall. I’d like to reserve the next available open machine….. Thanks Twitter.

Filed under Geo-temporal, Mashups, Web 2.0 |