TECHNOLOGY

 

Mattel taps into social media craze with Puppy Tweets

The high-tech toy will post one of 500 canned tweets to a dog's Twitter page after it's triggered by a sound and motion sensor worn on the animal's collar.

Dog owners are provided with a USB receiver that they connect to their computer. They then download the toy's software online and create a Twitter account for their dog. When the dog moves or barks, a signal is sent from its Puppy Tweets tag to the receiver, which updates the dog's Twitter page. (Mattel / February 4, 2010)

 

 

So you create a twitter account for your dog and it sends one of 500 pre-defined tweet to update its twitter status. Cute. Considering some of the stuff I see tweeted these days it probably blends in very well.

We might have to wait quite some time for a canine social network called barker, updates sent as barks and rebarks and geo-tagged photos from a collar-cam sent to your dog's growlr (flickr) account. But the whole area of tweets linked to monitors of physical conditions- motion, temperature, heart-rate, blood pressure, weather and so on is likely to lead to some very interesting and practical applications.