The walls have eyes: What would your home say about you?
The concept of what happens behind closed doors and shut blinds is a source of fascination for many in the world. However, flip it around, what if your house was the one broadcasting about your day-to-day activities. Imagine if the home was its own fly on the wall, and potentially its own personality (what if it thinks your taste in lampshades sucks, and the colour you've painted its ceiling is painful), and the sort of exciting dialogue you might then hear.
One man, with a similar idea, decided to rig up his Abbey Street, San Francisco home to do something very similar. His home is currently tweeting, based on sensors and pre-sent topics, about goins on in the home each day.
This below, from five hours prior to publishing, is amusing.
Tom just weighed himself. I'm going to leave it up to him to tell you if it's good news though.
— House of Coates (@houseofcoates) December 9, 2013And it responds to the temperature as well.
Gosh, it's getting chilly outside. It must be 37F (that's 3°C). If I had a nest I'd turn on the heating. Hint hint.
— House of Coates (@houseofcoates) December 6, 2013Technology Review explained how to rig up your home to do the same thing via this post. It gets a little bit strange (telling followers when owner Ben Coates has arrived home, or where he is visiting e.g. the coffee shop), but it's just generally amusing. Apparently he spent a few hundred dollars rigging up his home to do this (with products purchased from Amazon).
In serious reality, however, Coates noted that he thinks there are wider applications for this technology - including as a sort of social-media powered home security system using motion sensors and cameras.
This isn't the first time a house has been Twitter-connected (should we call it a Tweep?), with Andy Stanford-Clark from the UK having rigged up his cottage to do something similar in 2009. He connected sensors to everyday items to record similar things, and allowed each item to be a little tongue in cheek - picture a lamp telling you it's "turned on right now" - explains the Daily Mail.
It similarly provides a security purpose, but also helps with electricity consumption and shows water usage. Unfortunately, his tweets are protected as they are for his own use, so we can't share them here.