davehora.com

For some reason, design solutions to the plant-water problem keep popping up, but you think that by now people could remember to check if their dying green friends were a bit thirsty.

Yep, the options are ever increasing, as now you can stick an LED into your plants and it’ll flash when the h2o becomes scare (probably obnoxious), fall over when the water’s low (actually pretty cool–possibly messy?) and of course you can even just automate the task. For full disclosure’s sake, I will say that I’ve recently failed to support a houseplant of my own — but I’ll blame that on winter break, he was actually going strong for a good 5 months. Unfortunately, even my last-ditch effort, an advanced method of houseplant-shrubbery grafting seen below, has failed to rekindle my poor friend’s will to live.

Anyway, probably the weirdest and most Web 2.0 solution is the newest incarnation of Botanicalls, the Botanicalls Twitter project. When your plants need water, they let you know via Twitter. In terms of usefulness, unless you’re in a location where you can physically go and water the plant, the message is probably not going to help (e.g., when you find out your plant is thirsty during that lecture you should be paying attention to.)

The idea of hooking up non-human objects to Twitter is pretty intriguing though. I envision a dog collar with sensors and built in wireless capability that allows your dog to unconsciously microblog. Imagine what the feed would look like:

I just woke up and started walking around. about 1 hour ago from collar
I just went to sleep. 2 hours ago from collar
It looks like I probably peed on your carpet. about 2 hours ago from collar

Exciting!