lucasjosh.com

Being on the Twitter API development list is a good way to hear about new little apps before everyone else. Case in point, Log4Twitter. It’s an Appender to log4j which is pretty much the standard logging component for any Java project.

This wouldn’t be for debug logging or information logging. I think it could be useful for those fatal happenings when things are breaking and shutting down. By using Twitter, you could easily subscribe to an account, mark it private and have an easy way of getting notified when something catastrophic happens.

I think piggybacks nicely on the concept of Twitter as a message bus, whether human or computer. That is a direction which could make things very interesting.

The other thing that happens as more machines enter spaces previously restricted to humans is that the potential for interaction based on overhearing emerges. I used “overheard” very deliberately earlier - to suggest we’re not getting the original message (which, presumably, is in XML or binary or something) but a chinese whisper of it, cast out in public via Twitter. But now imagine if the API is two ways, and telescopes, watching the Twitter timeline can start acting upon the things they overhear. Scheduling software overhearing the Victoria line announcing that it’s broken. My cooker picking up that I’m leaving the office.

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twitter+as+message+bus, twitter, log4twitter