Ever wanted to see if you can be an even more self-indulgent, ecologically inclined attention whore? Well sky is the limit with the Tweet-a-watt! It’s a modified Kill A Watt product that updates your power usage wirelessly for all of your friends and minions to view on Twitter. The idea is simple, burn extra energy, waste time and resources and encourage others to do the same to up your eco-nerd street cred… If you think you are “badass” enough for this, check out their site for the how-to.
** After reading a detailed reply from one of the developers… I am not afraid to admit that I was wrong about my estimate of the product. **
Thanks for an in-depth reply to my snarky write-up. When I came across Tweet-a-watt, I went with my first impression, and without knowing the full story behind your gadget I wrote it off as impractical, trendy, attention “seeking” capitalization on eco pop-trends… I appreciate your patient explanation of the device, its use and philosophy. It is refreshing to see that there are people who genuinely give a shit about the world they live in. Sincerest Regards!
hiya – i am one of the co-developers, i’ll explain what it does and why we did it.
1. we choose twitter to explain in one sentence what it does “twitter your power usage” – people immediately know that it’s an internet connected power meter and the data is published, the smart folks know it’s using the API and as they read the article and source code – it uses google app engine and can publish to anything.
if you’re going to reduce, you need to measure – that’s what this does.
2. we released this project to the public domain so no one could patent the idea – in the next few years you’ll see almost “everything” report its usage. we wanted to put this out there so others can take our work and run with it.
3. we did win the design competition, but take a look at the other entries, we made a real device that works and others are making these and also making businesses around the idea already – we also donated the prize money to “engineers without borders”.
4. the power meters don’t suck power out in any significant way and you don’t even need a “base computer” to use all these – we used a modded router, so overall if we use these to just reduce a tiny amount of power (we have) it’s worth it for “years”.
any way, i’m bummed you said things like “self-indulgent, ecologically inclined attention whore” – i think we all have a lot of work ahead to fix the big problems in the world, but negative stuff like that isn’t going to solve anything.
PT I agree with you. Glad to see Gene did a quasi-retraction!