Your house is your new follower on Twitter

It’s hard to believe that the social media hype could ever be matched. However, the ubiquity that social media has in today’s world could soon apply to M2M. The integration of social media and machine to machine technology is developing fast.

There are some clear initiatives which have anticipated the coming together of two of the biggest trends today: Web 2.0 and the Internet of Things. Had it not been for M2M technology, it wouldn’t have been possible to carry out Guarana Antarctica’s advertising action which fueled a campaign car with likes and comments from its Facebook page, driving it to its destination.

Another example of how to combine social media with web-based M2M applications are NFC tags. By tapping the card on any activated station, a wireless connection is established which sends a message to the user’s social platforms or information to the user’s email address. This social application of NFC is becoming more and more common. Cutty Sark, for instance, uses it for socializing party moments, as we saw in a previous post about connected drinks which includes some other examples of the combination of M2M and Social Media.

Furthermore, many people who work with Wireless Industrial Router have had the same thought: if people can tweet, then why can’t objects do the same? Perhaps in a more experimental way, there are already many objects tweeting about what happens to them. Tom Coates’ house is one of the most well-known examples. From its account on Twitter,  @houseofcoates published when the owner arrives or when the lights are turned off thanks to a full intelligent management system.

Arduino is a platform which is widely used for this kind of experiments.Four-Faith’s Jesús Zorzano has tested a chair that tweets when anybody sits on it. It may seem like a pretty useless application of M2M, but it is just a prototype that shows how objects will be able to communicate in the future. Your computer could alert you when somebody turns it on, or your bed could send you a message if someone is lying on it. Let your imagination run wild.