Smarthome. Loans that change lives. GE | Plug Into the Smart Grid | Get Plugged In. Twitter Fast Growing Beyond Its Messaging Roots | Epicenter from. Thanks to its open-ended design and a thriving user community, Twitter is fast outgrowing its roots as a simple, easy-to-use messaging service. Enterprising hackers are creating apps for sharing music and videos, to help you quit smoking and lose weight — spontaneously extending the text-based service into one of the web’s most fertile (and least likely) application platforms. Hardware hackers have set up household appliances to send status alerts over Twitter, like a washing machine that tweets when the spin cycle is through, or a home security system that tweets whenever it senses movement inside the house. Others have incorporated Twitter into their DIY home automation systems.
Forgot to turn off the lights? Send a tweet to flip the switch by remote control. TED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human Sense -- Vide. LONG BEACH, California — Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they’re done. Pattie Maes of the lab’s Fluid Interfaces group said the research is aimed at creating a new digital "sixth sense" for humans.
In the tactile world, we use our five senses to take in information about our environment and respond to it, Maes explained. But a lot of the information that helps us understand and respond to the world doesn’t come from these senses. Instead, it comes from computers and the internet. Maes’ goal is to harness computers to feed us information in an organic fashion, like our existing senses. The prototype was built from an ordinary webcam and a battery-powered 3M projector, with an attached mirror — all connected to an internet-enabled mobile phone. See Other TED 2009 Coverage: Faradaymedia.com.