Go beyond updates, PC Plus reveals some of the weird projects that Twitter has given birth to.
Twitter isn’t just about telling the world what you had for lunch, any more than the phone is just a way of calling Mum. It’s a communications platform in its own right now, and you can do amazing things with those 140 characters – automatically generating content, serving up data on demand, sharing photos and much more. But what if you’re not feeling inspired? We’ve gathered together some projects people have put together through the medium of Twitter. Some are funny, some are useful and some are plain odd – but all are more interesting than a simple status update.
1. Read (or write) a book
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” One of the best known lines in all of literature, and there’s still 89 characters left. Twitter novels are served up in bite-size portions, and you don’t need any special software to do one yourself – just a manuscript and the ability to copy and paste. Get an intriguing introduction to a book by signing up for nothing but first lines, or if you fancy getting involved with an original Twitter story, check out We Tell Stories.
Some people have found another slant on the idea of Twitter books by serialising existing diaries. You can sign up for daily time-shifted entries from the likes of farm girl from 1937 and watch their lives unfold in quasi real-time.
2. Track the weather
As the winter chill froze the country earlier this year, many people were tweeting messages like ‘BA1 8/10 #uksnow’. What was that? It was a collaborative weather map that harnessed Twitter’s power to keep track of the UK’s current snow conditions. With everyone knowing that 2/10 meant ‘a few flakes’ and anything over 7/10 translated as ‘blizzard’, the map built up piece by piece as more and more people tweeted, giving a real- time picture of which areas in the UK were experiencing snow. It may not have been entirely accurate, but neither was the official weather forecast, and this at least had the advantage of being interactive.
3. Kick the habit
Any diet or attempt to break an addiction benefits from keeping notes on your progress, and Twitter offers an easy way of reinforcing good behaviour. Get into the habit of tweeting important information on what you’re doing, and sneaking that chocolate bar/cigarette/entire black forest gateau becomes a much more public affair. Having an electronic copy of your intake also makes it much easier to work out how well you’re doing, especially if you need to count calories. For dieting, there’s Tweet What You Eat and for smokers there’s Qwitter. Compulsive auto- tweeters may want to avoid these services, though: the only real hope for such Twitter addicts is for someone to sneak in and cut their internet connection.
4. Expand your brain
Twrivia is a daily Twitter-based trivia quiz. Follow @twrivia to receive a trivia question every day; each one is preceded by a 15-minute warning. The first five people to answer the question correctly score more points. There aren’t any prizes – it’s all about climbing the leaderboard and the fun of challenging your brain with a good trivia question.
Daily brainteasers in 140 characters or fewer. You can hit Google, but you won’t get in first if you do…
5. Change the world
As anyone who’s seen a hashtag spreading out and reaching people all across the world knows, Twitter excels at generating memes. Why not try putting that to good use by creating a Twitter-based petition? With Act.ly, you can pass around a URL and let people register their support in seconds. It won’t have the weight of a full postal campaign, but it should still work as a way of politely registering opposition to something you’re concerned about.
6. Monitor your friends
The dubious story of a best man rigging a newlywed couple’s bed with a weight monitor and tweeting their bedtime activities complete with stats on duration and frenzy may have rung every BS alarm ever created, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be done. Read the story and its claimed ending. If you’re unconvinced, why not break out a soldering iron and build something similar?
7. Become a spy/gangster/assassin
OK, not literally. MI5, Don Corleone and the Hashshashin may be on Twitter, but we don’t have their usernames. Instead, we’re talking about social games. Spymaster was the first game to make it big, with 140 Mafia and SNODS – currently offline following later. These games add a fictional layer to your existing contacts, which isn’t always popular with the people following you.
8. Give your household appliances a voice
Plants that tweet at you when they’re thirsty? Doable. Toasters that report when the toast is done? Old news. While the idea may sound silly, these ideas are a great example of Twitter moving beyond messaging. If you fancy doing something like this, you can even set up your appliance’s account to send you text messages. This means you don’t need to be at your PC to see what requires your attention, so the whole system should fit right into your daily life and existing phone systems. Handy!
Botanicalls kits let you wire your plants up to Twitter, letting you know if they want a drink, or are bored of hearing your voice.
9. Warn your loved ones
When disaster strikes, Twitter is becoming a vital communications system – as we’ve seen during the earthquakes in Haiti and the shootings in Mumbai. It’s also been used to warn friends about arrests in other countries and to get help to the top of a mountain. Might it save your life someday?
10. Kick up a fuss
Twitter has the world’s attention right now, and word spreads fast. If you’re a celebrity, it’s the perfect unfiltered platform, as film director Kevin Smith demonstrated when he complained about Southwest Air kicking him off a flight because of his weight. But the great thing about Twitter is that it doesn’t just give famous faces a chance to air their grievances to a wide audience – we all have a shot too. London blogger Robert Loch’s complaints about one club caught the attention of the tabloids, and stationery company Paperchase found itself in trouble after one artist found their work being used without permission and posted about it on the site.
11. Get things done
As easy as it is to waste time on Twitter, it can be helpful too. Sign up to a service like Remember The Milk and if you’re glued to Twitter all day long, at least you’ll be given reminders to be productive. They come as direct messages, so you’ll also get them via email, on your phone or however else you’ve opted to receive them.
12. Wash your mouth out
Here at PC Plus, we never ****ing swear. **** no. But if you’re having trouble minding your ****ing manners, ****ing head over to Cursebird to see how ****ing rude you really are. If the report fills you with shame, you can start ***ing your **** ***** out immediately.
13. Stream everything
For many people, Twitter is replacing the blog. You can post links to anything you like, but many services are making that process automatic. Tie Twitter in to Flickr and you’ll tweet about your favourite photos; add YouTube to post automatically about videos; and link up Xbox Live to share your latest achievements. If a service doesn’t do it automatically, there’s probably a plug-in somewhere. You’ll want to make sure it’s switched off for anything you don’t want friends to see, though…
14. See the world
Want to know what’s going on around the world? Visit and watch as tweets from every corner of the Earth pop up onto your screen. This is largely pointless, true, but it’s a great way to kill some time and see what everyone’s talking about.
15. Wear your words
Every now and again you find a tweet so perfect, so beautiful, that letting it slip into the archives would just be a crime. Why not get it on a T-shirt? At Tweetshirt come into their own – they show you your social graph in an easily sortable form. For clearing out the rubbish from your lists, try StopTweet.
17. Track packages
When you’re waiting for something exciting to arrive, there’s little worse than constantly having to log into the courier service’s website for updates. With TrackThis you can fire and forget, getting the latest news pinged straight to you. We hope every service offers something similar in the near future.
18. Interact with fictional characters
Not everyone on the internet is who they say they are, but some admit it. Hunt around and you can find Twitter accounts for every fictional character from Darth Vader and Superman to True Blood’s Sookie Stackhouse and Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother. These accounts aren’t usually official, and they occasionally get clamped down on – as happened with ABC when it found viewers tweeting as the characters from Mad Men – and tend to be parodies rather than actually trying to ‘be’ the Joker online. Still, they can be fun – as fans of Peep Show will have experienced when the ‘characters’ live-tweeted the newest series.
Get more involved with your favourite characters’ daily lives by following them on Twitter.
19. Build a bot
Want to create life of your own? Twitter bots are easy to create thanks to Botomatic. Using a simple rule-based system, you can build up a list of how you want the bot to behave when it receives messages and gets new followers. Then just give it a name and a description and unleash it on the world! These aren’t the kind of bots that can actually conduct a conversation with a human being, but they’re great at passing information on request or automating systems capable of posting onto websites. To see some of the bots people have made for Twitter, visit the Twitter Fan Wiki’s Bots page.
20. Thank someone
In the real world, you often thank someone by saying ‘I’ll buy you a drink’. This is another reason why Twitter is better than reality – with Foamee you can keep track of how many you still owe, and if anyone owes you a drink, you can redeem it without sounding like a grabby so- and-so. You can offer people either a beer or a coffee and then mark the drinks as redeemed when your taste buds are satiated or your conscience is clear. If you want to receive a soft drink, though, you’ll have to stick with the old fashioned way of grabbing a free beverage – hanging around at the pub, letting whoever owes you a drink get a round in and then somehow slipping away right before your turn.
