Twitter interface agents – Life streaming from your lunch meeting

Published originally on March 30th, 2009

When I see users either taking their attention off the presentation in a conference to tweet a comment, or dropping their utensils and their lively dinner conversation to update their Facebook and Twitter status, I see a user interface that is quickly becoming obsolete. When I have to stop the car to update my status “driving to Palo Alto to pitch a twitter idea to @jeffclavier” or simply trick the life part of life streaming by waiting to arrive Palo Alto to tweet it from my desktop, I see a life streaming interface already exposing its limitations and its need to evolve.

There are certainly good user experiences like Tweetie, Twitterfon or TwitterBerry when we have the time to thumb our status from our phones but as we start making this open discourse a natural behavior of our daily lives and find ourselves taking a shower, running a marathon, performing surgery or cooking with the urgent need to publish and distribute an idea or simply message our network, suddently our current mobile apps are not sufficient anymore.

Early-adopting, intensive twitter users and those using Twitter assistants are revealing how limited these interfaces are to stream their thoughts, ideas, life. Do we have dinner and chat, and tweet later our post-mortem, or we tweet as we chew and brake our conversation flow? We can get trapped into these contradictions or we can use them to invent new interfaces: Twitter interface agents.

What if our car-embedded app had voice recognition and voice tagging?

Mary: “Tweet open”
Agent: beep
Mary: “I think Tom is about to propose me… and I am thinking about it.”
Mary: “Tweet close”
Agent: beep beep

Or the agent in parsing your dinner chat and is already trained to recognize the needles in the haystack and can act as an advisor:

Tom, CEO: “I believe I need to shrink the company back to the core team.”
Agent: “Should I tweet that “?”
Tom, CEO: “No way!”
Tom, CEO: “Tweet Filter”
Agent: beep
Tom, CEO: “shrink the company – tweet filter close”
Agent: beep beep

Embedding Twitter interface agents in the physical world around us, eg. cars, cubicles, meeting rooms, etc could make streaming easier. And though twittering from your shower may certainly look a stretch, addressing these extreme user cases offers an idea of what the future of Twitter interfaces may be.

What awkward or funny situation have you twittered from? Do you need one of these interface agents?