Twitter goes high tech as mass uptake gains momentum [NYT]

Pairing sensors with Twitter leads some to think Twitter could be used to send home security alerts or tell doctors when a patient’s blood sugar or heart rate climbs too high. In the aggregate, such real-time data streams could aid medical researchers.

SHOOT: Twitter was dull when no one was on it. Now that more people are on it, more people want to be in on it.

clipped from www.nytimes.com SAN FRANCISCO — The first reaction many people have to Twitter is befuddlement. Why would they want to read short messages about what someone ate for breakfast? It’s a reasonable question. Twitter unleashes the diarist in its 14 million users, who visited its site 99 million times last month to read posts tapped out with cellphones and computers. Individually, many of those 140-character “tweets” seem inane. But taken collectively, the stream of messages can turn Twitter into a surprisingly useful tool for solving problems and providing insights into the digital mood. By tapping into the world’s collective brain, researchers of all kinds have found that if they make the effort to dig through the mundane comments, the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiment — and even help them shape it.