It is a transport  mechanism for carrying any sort of message – be that human conversation, computer messages, collating messages or sending messages.

How can I show the value of messages?

My good friend Mike Stenhouse created Out of five – a beautifully elegant way to capture reviews. You tweet in the name of the gig/film/book with a rating (out of five) and a short review.

@oo5 Coraline 4.0 simply wonderful

You have a record of what you’ve experienced with a date and a way of getting at that data later (through your own rss feed). Also a brilliant social aspect kicks in as the reviews are trasmitted through twitter so if you are following a person who reviews something – you see their review and could find a way into OO5 that way. Also all the reviews collated together and you start to see other peoples reviews of the things you like – You could follow those people as they could be your influencers if you share the same tastes.

Nathan from flowing data has been beta testing your flowing data for a little while and now it has launched. The mechanic to OO5 is very similar but it is more open in terms of what it records – In that you can record any metric – If you want to track your weight you just tweet -

d yfd weigh 160

Again all that data you send in can be extracted and the other benefit is that data visualisations can be generated straight from the site.

Beautiful stuff.

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1) Twitter and other systems have opened up to let other systems interact through them via an API to send/retrieve data.

2) Electronics such as arduino or ioBridge have made the geeky electronics bit much easier.

3) Programming interfaces such as Processing or Openframeworks have made the geeky programming bit much easier.

Here is a little recap of some interesting/useful/useless/fun interfaces.

Tweet when you toot!

An ordinary office chair – you let out a little bottom burp and a twitter status gets updated. I kid you not. It actually uses a methane gas sensor and some amazing hacking skills to work.

Social Networking for My Toaster

Fed up with waiting around for your toast to be done – well now your toaster tweets when that bready goodness is ready. Poke London did a much higher tech version of this recently – Baker Tweet.

Kickbee

A baby growing and moving inside a mothers womb is a special experience that the father doesn’t have to miss out on – A sensor is hidden inside a rather stylish garment which is wrapped round the waist of the mother and every ‘kick’ by the baby is broadcast to twitter.

Botanicalls

Forget to water your plants? Wish they would tell you when they need a drink? Well they now can.

NewsAlarm – wiring in to the NYT NewsWire API

Want to know if aliens are invading the earth? Take one fire alarm – The New York Times API and a bit of hacking and you have your very own aliens detector. The system works by monitoring the New York Times and if 50% of the articles are about aliens then 85db of screeching alarm will alert you to the fact – totally ridiculous but genius all the same.

Ideal also for perking up your dog.

Tweeting Cat Door

Putting an RFID on a cat flap is a great way to keep naughty neighbourhood cats from eating their way into your house as the flap only opens if your cat is at the door – but who not hook this upto a twitter feed so you can track the comings and goings of your feline friends.

I actually would love to extend this to put a GPS or RFID on a cat and track where it goes to on its prowl – I bet this would be surprising how far they go.

Digit’s Ear

Want to tell the world your office is quite as a mouse – well why not create a digital ‘ear’ that can monitor sound levels and tweet the changes.

Digit’s Ear from Digit on Vimeo.

If you have any more examples of electronic/api mashupery then send them my way.

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