Tweeting on-hold Wait Times?

So I have had the idea that I think would be a great service to allow people to tweet when they are being asked to wait on hold on the telephone, or at the doctor or dentist office. Something like #onhold or #waiting and then the company that you are waiting #onhold ATT or #onhold Frontier or #waiting Walmart.  It would be important to really think about how to handle the formatting of the tags and support information. I realize you could just start doing it on twitter and see it would take off, but it might be interesting to build a site designed to aggregate the data and provide the Zeitgeist in a human readable way.    If you could add an estimated time, that would be great as well.

I haven't thought it through, but it seems the service would be valuable to consumers if linked to Yelp or other consumer services and it could provide insight into customer service for many companies.  It might also be more of a mobile app, but I think there wouldn't be strong adoption if people had to download an app.

Is there anything out there already?  I haven't looked.

One positive angle would be to allow people to log something productive or positive they were able to do while waiting.

#waiting dentist 10min brainstormed new twitter service

UPDATE: Bob Coffield twitter stream reveals something along these lines in healthcare...

@iHealthBeat new web-based tool called @MedWaitTime
 to check wait times at hospitals and doctor's office: http://bit.ly/9r56Lo#health20

Twitter is only for lunch plans and the weather

Twitter went down for awhile this morning and it seems to be a point of conversation in the larger social network of the web. Places like Facebook (also having issues today) and Friendfeed pick up the communication connections while Twitter is down.

But what I wanted to post about is the fact that many have to "snicker" or react to it light-heartedly. This is true from general people making comments or large media outlets.

For users of the fast-growing messaging service, the outage means no tweeting about lunchplans, the weather or the fact that Twitter is down. - Fox News

I don't think that we will see this overtime, but for now we mock or find amuzing what we don't understand. I wonder why write the article that it is down if it doesn't have value?

A Twittering Coffee Machine

I think this is interesting. A Twittering coffee machine. Much like my post about controlling your house lighting, it is fun to consider how a world full of twittering objects could make life easier. This coffee pot is connected to a Macbook so I don't think it is cost effective, but the idea of getting a tweet when the coffee is ready, is something I would like.

Blankomat, The Coffee Machine That Tweets from Plugg Conference on Vimeo.

Adding a Twitter Widget

I added a widget to my blog that would display my Twitter updates. I am not sure exactly who I am sending this information to, but I thought it might be good to bring it all together in one place. We will see. I think that my adhoc approach to tools and widgets on my blog site has not been too supportive for readers, it has been mostly about me trying out new tools. That has really been what my blog has been about.

If you are interested in adding a Widget for Twitter, it was really easy. Go to WidgetBox and enter your twitter username. Then embed the code into your blog.

Twitter to Your House

Check out this cool idea. You can send Twitter messages to your house.



Control Lights with Twitter from Justin on Vimeo.

I think that this is another great example of how the web and the physical world are coming together.

My Thoughts on Twitter

Here is a comment I left on Ryan's blog.

I think what a lot of people see in twitter is really it's potential or even what it represents and not it's current state of functionality.

It is really a lot like skype when it was first released in 98 or 99... I signed up the first week or month of public release and it didn't really work well and there wasn't really anyone I knew to call or link up with. I had a couple of poor quality conversations with people in Montana and Australia? I think... And I thought well, that's kind of cool, but so what?

Twitter, in my opinion represents the future of the web in a way that shows how we will be able to communicate and interact with people we know or at least those we trust. The web will soon be is pervasive and if we can provide our profile or virtual presence with the appropriate metadata, that enables realtime, dynamic interactivity within a group without picking up the phone to call or sending an email. I'll just check your status or your last entry and I will make a judgement on how to best interact with you. It will save both you and me time. I will also get your insights and emotions on issues and happenings in realtime. Think about knowing that your wife dropped the kids off at school safely or think of a twitter, flickr, and news mashup that you can go back and look at what you were doing or thinking during a certain time in history.

There are several things that I would do to improve twitter and they need better tools to provide the ability to deal with monitoring anyone outside of my small circle of trust, but its a start.

Twitter is cool and will get purchased by one of the big players for millions. I wish I would have thought of it.