Using Twitter to Remote Control Your Home's Lights
by Jaymi Heimbuch, San Francisco, California 
on 12. 5.08
Control Lights with Twitter from Justin Wickett on Vimeo.
Twitter is starting to develop as a platform for practical green living. You can stream green tips from Max Gladwell, monitor your energy consumption, heck – you can even follow TreeHugger!
And now, you can even turn your lights on or off from your Twitter stream! Read on for more about how to do this cool trick.
All that is needed to get this to work is an Insteon switch that you wire to a computer with internet access. Then use your cell phone to text Twitter and tell it what light you want it to switch on or off. Easy peasy!
This could mean Twitter can be a way to cheaply rig your home for more efficient energy use with essentially a remote control.
If you have to leave your computer running in order to make this work, then it pretty much cuts out any savings on efficiency. But it certainly sparks some creative thinking! With smart metering and home automation just around the corner, we're sure more solutions similar to this will be available shortly.
Via Good Clean Tech
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More on Remote Controlled Houses:
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So you have to have a computer running 24/7 for this to work?
Very energy efficient . . .
I've seen some of this before. Unfortunately the HW platforms (and all the network setup etc) seem too daunting for me.
A friend of mine showed me a board from ioBridge recently and it handles a lot of the network stuff for you.
I've got to accumulate the servos and sensors first but i love the way technology is finally allowing us to _interact_ w/o being forced to only use a mouse and keyboard!
I honestly don't know much about this, but what if the computer were an XO laptop? Don't those consume a tiny amount of electricity? I mean, there have to be some kind of applications for this.
Hmm, an interesting concept of revolutionizing the remote control; however, physically turning the lights off or even sensors that turn on/off things might seem to be more practical to me.