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Sony's Lifelogging Device Allows Cats to Tweet, Lonely Owners to Giggle

by Amar Toor on June 2, 2010 at 03:05 PM

sony unveils cat tweeting deviceWhen Mattel's 'Puppy Tweets' opened up Twitter to the entire canine community, cat owners everywhere were outraged over what they saw as overt discrimination -- and with good reason. Why, pray tell, should a dog's inner thoughts be valued higher than a cat's? Would the animal kingdom really sit on its hands and allow Twitter to refuse service to an entire population, simply because of the size of their paws or the length of their tongues? But now, Sony has smashed through the bestial barrier, with the help of a new breakthrough bauble.

As Tech-On reports, Sony's new lifelogging gadget is comprised of a box containing a camera, an acceleration sensor and a GPS tag. Once attached around the neck of your favorite kitty [Ed. Note: But there are so many!], the device monitors virtually everything the feline does, including walking, sleeping and eating -- which is pretty much all any cat does. Not only that, but Sony's new contraption also allows your cat to tweet about his or her activity via a Bluetooth device that sends out one of eleven pre-set messages to a computer. If, for example, your cat is eating, the gadget picks up on it and notifies the computer, which then tweets, "This tastes good," on your cat's account (even, of course, if the grub's just okay). The company is also looking to expand the list of default tweets, in the hopes of making them dependent upon the combination of actions an animal does. For example, if your cat eats after walking, the automatic tweet would read, "Meals taste better after a walk," or, perhaps, "Meals taste better when I don't tweet about them".


Obviously, the device could ruffle the feathers of animal lovers, especially if it's forcibly planted around a cat's neck. Sony, however, took that into account, and calibrated the box so that it would never comprise more than 5-percent of a cat's body weight. Still, it doesn't look exactly comfortable, and we doubt any cat, if given the choice, would actually choose to rock one of these. But then again, no one ever said the struggle for civil rights would be easy, either. [From: Tech-On; via: DVICE]

Tags: animals, cat tweets, Cats, CatsAndDogs, CatTweets, device, Gadgets, GPS, kittens, kitty, pets, socialnetworking, SONY, top, tweeting cats, TweetingCats, twitter, web

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