By Jason Wilson
Today’s idea for now is something all you Twitterholics out there might like: a social media audio system. Yes, it’s off the legal publishing path, but not everything can be about books.
If you’re like me and drive to work every morning, you’ve no doubt nailed your morning and evening routine. (And for you green conscience out there, I’m not opposed to riding the 15.3 miles to work on my bike; but hey, this is Houston. That could be a weather joke or a bad driver one, your pick.) So when I was driving in to work a couple of weeks ago, I just happened to be rolling slowly next to this dude who was scrolling through his iPhone checking e-mail, box scores, Twitter, Facebook, whatever. He was fully engaged in his phone, and driving. This is dangerous by the way. And I can’t claim I haven’t done the same thing, I have. I’m tuned in, just as much as he is, which is why I want someone to make this system now.
Because RSS to speech has been around for a while, my thought was that {insert your car manufacturer of choice} could introduce a Social Media Audio System (SMAS) to capture all of my lifestream feeds and convert them for aural consumption. My thought was that after you buy your vehicle, you would be able to log in to, for example, smas.bmw.com, plug in your VIN, and set up an account that allows you to use your OpenID and run your entire lifestream through the portal. In this case, BMW, converts my lifestream to speech, and pipes it into my car’s audio system. As I listen to the posts, I could then rely on voice recognition to skip or pause the stream and tag items with things like “favorite” and “read later.” I could also reply to messages by simply stating “reply” and repeating the message into the speaker. If your lifestream application has a character limit, the SMAS would automatically truncate the message and assign a url shortener ID for the remainder. I could also forward lifestream messages by saying “forward,” and giving the address of the recipient. Finally, for lifestream data that I tagged with “read later”, those messages would then be packaged together and forwarded my Kindle account or a separate phone app (think Instapaper). Of course, this assumes I could tether off my phone or my car has data connectivity, which is an entirely different issue altogether.
If you want to hear some tweets in speech, check out this post.
I figure on a morning commute, I could pretty much knock out most of my feeds before I even get into the office. And for me, that’s some helpful GTD.
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