We’ve already brought you a homemade Twitter-enabled washing machine, and toilet, but now a new innovation is being brought to the table by a bigger player. IBM is working on a tweeting television remote, which would allow the user to inform the world what they are watching. Although unfiltered reporting could create awkward situations, the combination of America’s love for television and Twitter is sure to yield interesting results. They also mentioned that it could be configured to report to other sites, such as Facebook or joost. Any ideas why IBM would have in such a patent are welcome in the comments. More info can be found here and here.
large corporation with (nearly) unlimited funding + new idea they think may be big = why not patent?
I would imagine that this could be used to provide better statistical information on show ratings (what viewers are actually watching), advertising, etc..
TWEET: I am watching playboyTV.
funny shit. i wouldnt want that thing in my den.
The worst idea since the twittering toilet.
When my friend had Boxee doing this, I stopped following him. Really, I don’t care if you’re watching reruns of Seinfeld or not.
New rule: People who use twitter must be referred to as “Twitts”… especially people who buy products like this.
Don’t really need it. Set up MythTV with a shell script that tweets what has been recorded.
random person: you have been watching scrambled porn for 1 hour.
i am so sick of twitter. seriously.
It’s a cool idea for someone trying to rig up some sort of way to monitor everything he does in a given day.
I don’t really see this as a big seller for IBM though. Patents tend to kill ideas, not increase profit on every single idea someone comes up with. Unless there is a big demand for this that i don’t know about, it’s not gonna save IBM from 100s of one-off device makers. But i guess it keeps their lawyers busy.
@bob: no, they’re called ‘cunts’
i’ve heard of some new tv shows such as “glee” partnering with twitter for their launches, it makes sense, i mean twitter is a way of gauging what viewers are thinking, an advertiser can easily check twitter for instance to see what people think of their latest commercial, getting people to @ reply you on twitter is an easy call to action and a lot of people these days watch tv whilst working on their laptops or what not, cheers, twitter(at)locspoc
this is the stupidest thing i have ever heard of. WHO FUCKING CARES WHAT YOU ARE WATCHING? people are stupid.
television is meaningless. things like this tend to promote the idea that it somehow has meaning.
twitter is also meaningless. nobody cares what you are doing.
Ewww, twitter! get it off get it off. What a fad.
I think most of the negative people above are missing the point. I would think IBM is thinking more about Nielsen Ratings and that sort of thing. Nielsen spends a lot of money (they paid me $20 for one week) to have people fill out surveys of exactly what they watch that week. They then sell that data to the networks and advertisers who use it to see what are the most popular shows and advertise accordingly. Having exact data of what channels are being watched when, which commercials are being skipped over etc, could be very useful (read: valuable) to advertisers.
there sure are a lot of people that like to stand on their damn soapboxes nowadays.. hell you guys must have eaten paint chips as children
“Nielsen spends a lot of money (they paid me $20 for one week) to have people fill out surveys of exactly what they watch that week. They then sell that data to the networks and advertisers who use it to see what are the most popular shows and advertise accordingly. Having exact data of what channels are being watched when, which commercials are being skipped over etc, could be very useful (read: valuable) to advertisers.”
This is exactly the ‘best’ use. Nielsen relies on a ‘self-report’ model, which only appeals to a certian type of viewer. Twitter is almost invisible to the user, and therefore will appeal to ALOT more demographics. Valuable? Yes. Good? Not so much.