Tweetfuel : An Arduino-controlled experiment that uses the Nike+ FuelBand to measure the health of our Twitter account.
The number of spins is dictated by an algorithm that takes things like type of activity and the user's total followers into account. The resulting fuel is therefore a metric of our health on Twitter.
How does it work?
Whenever someone tweets @stinkdigital, a modified Fuelband, hooked to a motor, spins. The more followers that person had, the longer the Fuelband spins. In an era of +1s and +Ks, it’s a somewhat silly, almost gameshow-esque reward for a social media mention. The even cooler level, though, is that the firm tweaked some of the Nike+ code to allow (okay, force) Nike’s built-in graph to measure all these tweets. So a few RTs become a parallel to a sprint in their interface. A story that goes viral could resemble a marathon through the day.
Somewhat ironically, TweetFuel ends up resembling contemporary social media tools more than most exercise programs. Take one look at the Nike+ interface, and you’ll see glossy, branded analytics that look far more like Sprout Social than they do your average treadmill LCD. And that’s a reassuring thing. Graphs don’t all need to look like they’ve been crapped out by Excel anymore, not when we’ve all become such desk-dwelling data junkies.
The number of spins is dictated by an algorithm that takes things like type of activity and the user's total followers into account. The resulting fuel is therefore a metric of our health on Twitter.
How does it work?
Whenever someone tweets @stinkdigital, a modified Fuelband, hooked to a motor, spins. The more followers that person had, the longer the Fuelband spins. In an era of +1s and +Ks, it’s a somewhat silly, almost gameshow-esque reward for a social media mention. The even cooler level, though, is that the firm tweaked some of the Nike+ code to allow (okay, force) Nike’s built-in graph to measure all these tweets. So a few RTs become a parallel to a sprint in their interface. A story that goes viral could resemble a marathon through the day.
Somewhat ironically, TweetFuel ends up resembling contemporary social media tools more than most exercise programs. Take one look at the Nike+ interface, and you’ll see glossy, branded analytics that look far more like Sprout Social than they do your average treadmill LCD. And that’s a reassuring thing. Graphs don’t all need to look like they’ve been crapped out by Excel anymore, not when we’ve all become such desk-dwelling data junkies.
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