Wired.com’s Beer Robot

A response to How Wired.com Built Beer Robot, Our DIY Kegerator as posted on Wired.com

It started out innocently enough. After work one day at the local brewpub, three Wired.com staffers had a revelation: “What our office really needs is a kegerator!”

We didn’t know this passing idea, the kind you often have after several beers but never follow up on (”Dude, we should totally road trip to Jazzfest this year!”), would culminate in a keg party at that same brewpub to celebrate the public debut of Beer Robot.

But at the next editor’s meeting, we suggested converting a fridge into a kegerator for our How-To Wiki. Who’s going to say no to that? Nobody in that meeting anyway. Soon we had dreamed up a super geeky, tricked-out kegerator that would have all sorts of functions involving everything from a Twitter stream to a Wii.

Now I realize what you’re all thinking here.

“John, this has nothing to do with I101, you’re just blogging about beer.”

And see, that’s where you’re wrong.  Well, kind of at least.  Look, this thing has an entire side that looks like HAL 9000, therefore it has EVERYTHING to do with Informatics.

Now, the main part of the project I guess may not really be that relevant (but seriously, it’s beer, so of course it’s relevant), but some of the little things they have added to it are what really made it grab my attention.  Now I feel like I’ve done a fairly good job of making my views on Twitter known.  If there’s one major disadvantage with the internetz, it’s the phenomenon of making otherwise intelligent people turn into loud, obnoxious idiots, and I really feel that Twitter does a wonderful job catering to that group.

With that little rant out of the way, let’s continue.  The guys over at wired.com installed a flowmeter into the kegerator, and now the sucker Tweets when it’s running low on beer, when it’s out, and when a new keg has been hooked up.  I would much rather read about the adventures of a kegerator then the adventures of an idiot.  I’m just sayin’.  Now while realistically this has no redeeming social value whatsoever, projects like this open up a whole new world of possibilities.

We’ve all heard about how future houses are going to do all sorts of pretty cool things.  You’ll be able to pop online (or text it, or apparently go to Twitter) from the store, and it’ll tell you “Hey, you should probably order some more milk, since you’re about out and this bottle expired like three weeks ago, you bum.”  Technology like that used in the Beer Robot is what I think are the foundations of what will become new technology trends.  Between RFID tags and wireless dodads that send off Tweets (and their not dumb equivalents), there are some really, really cool possibilities out there, just looking for some geeks to write the idea down on a bar napkin somewhere.

Downsides?  Well, I’m sure that somewhere out there, in the sick, sick land of the internet, someone has hooked up their toilet to Tweet every time it’s flushed.