If Products Could Tweet
For the second year in a row a DIY project wins the Greener Gadgets Competition – this time it’s a crew from Make Magazine who hacked into a Kill-a-Watt in order to give the device a Twitter voice.
The Kill-a-Watt power meter will “tweet” the daily kilowatt hours consumed to the user’s Twitter account. Make is releasing this project as an “Open source hardware” project – in other words, any ITP student can make these, modify them and make a commercial product from the ideas and methods.
The idea taps into human universal concepts of shame and competition. The creators feel that “there is a social imperative and joy in publishing one’s own daily KWH – by sharing these numbers on a service like Twitter users can compete for the lowest numbers and also see how they’re doing compared to their friends and followers.”