Some while ago my wife brought me a Maplin badged, Watson WH1081 weather station. It has an outdoor unit which measures temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity and rain fall. A wireless indoor unit then displays and logs the data. The indoor unit also has a USB port allowing it to be connected to a computer of some description.

The Software that comes with it is fairly basic, however http://sandaysoft.com offers some free and very powerful software call cumulus.

The cumulus software will talk to the indoor unit, manage the data logger, produce charts as you might expect. Then come the great stuff, it has built in tools to upload the data to a web site of your choosing, via FTP, as well as uploading the data to several weather services. A recent addition to the feature set is twitter. Cumulus will now send a tweet on a predefined regular basis with a summary of the current weather conditions

Mine is now tweeting to http://twitter.com/abbeymeadwx

Social networks are not NEW,

They have just gained a wider audiance due to improvod usability.

USENET or news groups started in 1979 (long before HTTP), where like minded individuals could gather and exchange puclic messages, very much like twitter today.

The big difference, it was mainly a hardcore GEEK world.

There is a lot of hype in the media of late about privacy, big brother state, Google street view, state owned data base on phone calls and internet use. There has also been some on social networks and gate crashing parties. But on closer examination there is more in common between state / corporate privacy issues and social networking that you might think.

Let’s talk about something we all understand first. If a young college student is doing child care studies, with the goal of becoming a child minder or nursery nurse, goes out and gets very drunk, falls over into someone else and a fight breaks out, a drunk and disorderly (or even GBH) charge may result. She will now fail the CRB check required to work with children. Mind you in extreme circumstance putting you bin out in the wrong day could also cause you to fail future CRB check!

Now apply this to social networking like Facebook, or ANY photo sharing service which allows tagging , naming and comments on photos, Flickr, Picasa Twitpic to name a few..

Now let’s re-visits the above scenario. A young college student is doing child care studies, with the goal of becoming a child minder or nursery nurse, goes out and gets very drunk, falls over, and is then sat in a pool of her own vomit with her underwear on show to everyone. Out pops all the camera phones, and with-in minutes that photo, she would rather forget, is posted ALL over the internet. Add some powerful internet search engine and you have a personal brand problem which is much harder to deal with than any official or corporate database will ever be.

Oh and just to make it worse, you have just been stitched up by your mates, not some organisation out to make money…..

You have been warned !!

Just found a .NET twitter api class, i can feel some automated twittering comming on http://is.gd/3a9X