Using Twitter as a mechanism to remote control applications? [closed]

Question

I was brainstorming interesting usages of Twitter and came up with the following:

• An application can use it as a call home mechanism
• An application that has an invalid license could broadcast its location
• A software company could use it as a remote shell like interface and issue commands to shutdown, restart and to publish patches
• An application can use it for heartbeat purposes

Has anyone else came up with other non-standard usages of Twitter?

Implausibility

-1 for trying to use the wrong tool for the job. Seriously, remote shell? What's up with all this Twitter madness nowadays? – Hersch

@Tiberiu Ana - you can't remote shell from a Nokia 3210, but you can Twitter (by SMS) – Gangland

Answer 1

I fail to see the advantage of using a proprietary, third-party chat site in place of an appropriate networking protocol.

Joggle

If it suits the needs of whatever system, then why not? Perhaps it would not be the best idea for a proprietary application, but I think it has some pretty cool uses as far as automation goes. – Buckler

It's all about the ability to "raise events". Twitter has a number of ways to "Tweet", hence the usefulness to be able to do such things. – Gangland

It reminds me the famous quotation: 'Everything looks like if you are holding a good hammer.' [ +1 ] – Midst

Exactly, SashaN. HTTP in general and twitter/gmail/facebook in particular are huge hammers right now. – Joggle

Answer 2

Matthew nailed the point that all these "applications" just represent a communications protocol between twitterer and remote host, and there are lots of mature protocols you could use instead right out of the box, rather than rolling your own on twitter.

But depending on your situation, of course there could be scenarios in which twitter is the easy way. I have written similar hacks that use e-mail as transport mechanism for automated tasks, simply because corporate red tape doesn't permit us other more conventional means. They can reboot machines, restart processes, post public messages, etc.

Gerianne

Answer 3

One of it is already available for Windows - "TweetMyPC v2.0 lets you shutdown/restart/LogOff and lots more in your windows PC.remotely."

Cultus

@Shoban: That is nice. I have not used it though. I will give it a try the next time I boot up Windows. :-) – Cultus

Answer 4

I'm not sure this counts as a very practical use (a bit of fun mainly), but it certainly attracted my interest:

Twitter image encoding challenge

The idea of this challenge is to try to encode a picture into a 140 (Unicode) character Tweet. It's quite astounding how much information some of the algorithms posted there can fit into a message.

Buckler

That is clever. I like how people use CJK characters to maximize bandwidth. – Joggle

Answer 5

Scott Hanselman used Twitter to create an app for ordering a sandwich.

Check out his post

Buttonhook

Wow, that's just.. staggering. Sandwich.. on Twitter.. imagine the possibilities! Seriously now, fun proof of concept for quickly hacking something together. – Hersch

Answer 6

I think the main advantage of using twitter in instances like this is its SMS capabilities (and the fact they're free - whereas you can buy services that charge a monthly fee to allow you to receive SMS messages to a HTTP page or something like that).

I'd considered using it to make a little budget app for myself where I could SMS twitter things I'd bought to a private twitter account, similar for tracking petrol usage I was planning on smsing the odometer reading,cost etc in a certain format and capturing it at home to run statistics and stuff on it. There are limitations to it though - like you can only hook up an SMS number to 1 twitter account...

It's good to think outside the box, but don't be too focused on using just twitter because it's cool.

Zoubek

Answer 7

If you were comfortable setting up sensors and such, you could get a microcontroller, hook it up to a twitter feed, and then give it remote commands.

For instance, remote controlled house lights. You could then just tweet "Home lights on GXSDFXV" (The garbage at the end is to prevent real tweets from turning on and off your lights).

Saturate

Even if you insist on Twitter you can do better than a 49-bit signature (I'm being generous, and assuming you're accounting for replay in any way). – Joggle

Well I was thinking you would have the sensor follow only your feed and only with the given tag in your tweets. So you have to be logged in and post that code. As long as your twitter isn't compromised, I don't see the problem. – Saturate

And why wouldn't it be compromised? Twitter has not been nearly secure enough in the past (wired.com/threatlevel/2009/01/professed-twitt , h-online.com/security/Twitter-confirms-security-breach--/news/…) to assume it's a safe transport. – Joggle

Answer 8

I wouldn't use Twitter in particular for transferring any private information (think about security if someone hacks the account and can shutdown your corporate servers or transfer fake licenses). For that I would setup a private server which implements the open microblogging protocol (like identi.ca) as long as - like others already said - there is another more suitable protocol. For publishing PUBLIC information (heartbeat messages can be considered that, too) I like the idea pretty much. We recently had a very successfull (but unfortunately effectless) E-Petition in Germany where a Twitter account posted the number of signatures every couple of minutes.

Hexangular

Answer 9

Carsonified are using this to allow people to discover other people sitting in the same room at their conferences.

They label each chair with a tag and then you tweet that tag to an account they have and it registers you on a floorplan on the venue. Users are coloured in on the plan by their interests.

Clever but a bit overcomplicated for my tastes...

http://hello.carsonified.com/Home/Faq

Megacycle