Twine: Listen to your world, talk to the Internet

So yes, it lets people shoot themselves in the foot; yes, people will most likely shoot themselves in the foot; but no, that's not the main problem and in fact you can hypothetically use twine + twitter in a more or less private manner.

The problem is that broadcasting through Twitter makes you depend on a service by a company, where you could just as easily have come up with a solution that works with a publicly-known protocol which can be deployed by many parties (the closest match here would be status.net).

Then again, their point is precisely to make using the bloody thing easy. It's increadible how the easy way to make things usable always implies lots of trade-offs in security, privacy, openness and whatnot... No wonder people who solve usability problems the right way are so valuable.

[1] DEFCON 18, "Web services we just don't need": http://youtu.be/mbZccSwgbIU (it runs almost 1h, and is equal parts hilarious and pointless).

Also, practically speaking - filtering out specific tweets and alerting on them is an issue with a Twitter client, and not the Twitter platform. Similarly, the privacy setup can be readily handled either via direct messages or by protecting tweets. In other words, Twitter is really not a bad choice for their purpose. Not ideal, but still a good functional fit.

People will obtain value from these devices if it meets their needs and exercises their imagination.

I've been working on a more modular, open source system like this for the last year or so: http://rascalmicro.com. The Rascal has powerful hardware and a real web interface, but it works with Arduino shields.

Twine looks pretty good, and I'm heartened to see that the web interface has some polish to it.

(Supermechanical, if you're reading this, let's get together some time. I'm one town over in Somerville-- email is in my profile. I don't think we're competitors. My customers use soldering irons; I bet yours don't.)

How does a sensors tell if I've fed the dog today?

To me, it's basically a matter of cost. If the "washer is done" sensor costs $50, I'd much rather just get up and check it myself. If it costs $5, I'd be more than happy to buy it. A lot of these sensor companies seem to be targeting the $20-$30 price point; to many, that is too expensive!

Make a base station that is about $20, and a sensor that costs less than $5. You'll be selling millions of those things in no time.

The future is awesome.

Arduino + ZigBee + modular wireless sensors, or something like that.

As it was said in a discussion here in HN a couple of says ago ("Welcome to the new web"), RSS and Atom feeds are becoming less and less supported. Which is a sad and bad thing with regard to the internet of things that is to come with Twine and GreenGoose and Arduino/xbee/sensors.

The appropriate protocols are there. Please use them.