While we haven’t yet arrived at Todd’s (cybernetic) activity stream vision, mere days after our post, Darren Cloutier has answered the call:
I saw the post about this on Friday night and thought it would make a great weekend project! From my old PC in the basement, a PHP script logs into the web server on each TiVo box and grabs the XML file with everything that is currently on the box. This part was written by somebody on the community forums back when TiVo2Go was first released as a way to translate your now playing list to an HTML document. Since I already run this script every hour to update my website, I simply added some more code which looks for recordings that have a start time greater than one hour ago, format the text as a nice Tweet and then redirect these to Twitter via the Twitter API which is easily accessible in PHP.
A little imagination and some PHP elbow grease is all it took to give Darren’s TiVos a voice. Again, not quite as interactive as what Todd envisions. But a cool project, nonetheless. And, if you’re feeling voyeuristic, those TiVo recording tweets can be found here: http://twitter.com/TwiVo
In other Twitter automation news, Macworld’s Jason Snell documents a variety of ways to script or filter tweets. But, wait. There’s more! The Twitter team recently documented the incubation and evolution of their 140 character service. Plus, yours truly has been anointed as a top tech tweeter by Jason Hiner of ZDNet.