Tweet-a-watt mention at EDN’s POWERSOURCE by Margery Conner…

In the world model of ubiquitous computing, aka, “Things that think,” significant physical objects have intelligence, temporary storage, sensing components, and often form computing networks. These wireless sensor networks are usually pretty sophisticated: One popular networking protocol is Zigbee, based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard…

However, I’m seeing another approach to communications for these proliferating objects that are just so eager to talk with something: Twitter feeds. You’re probably familiar with Twitter, the micro-blogging platform that constrains posters to a brusque 140-character limit. It’s a simple yet robust method for posting 140 characters in a stream out to the world for online monitoring. Less well-known is that Twitter has a search function that’s much closer to monitoring information in real-time than Google’s search, and no wonder, since Twitter’s searchable content is a fraction of the size of the HTML pages Google attempts to keep up to date…

Just a quick note to add – Twitter is a cheap/easy/free SMS gateway, super simple for notification services for devices – it’s also fun for folks to build projects like Tweet-a-watt and show the results to their friends (or anyone else).