It was only a matter of time when my toaster would want to try our a new social network. My Toaster is Now on TikTok.

TikTok is beta testing three minute videos. That was good timing for my toaster. Most of my toasting sessions are around two minutes long. The most interesting video that you are going to watch on TikTok is my toaster toasting two slices of white bread. If you do find this video, you will be surprised by the ending. It is worth watching and it is worth sharing the video with all of your friends.

MyToaster has been famous for a while and had demands when moving to TikTok. The toaster wanted great lighting and be shown in their best light. And, every content creator on TikTok uses a ring light. Becky walked into the kitchen, saw what I was doing, and then walked out. I spent some time last night figuring out the angels by positing the ring light and camera.

Follow MyToaster’s journey on Twitter and now TikTok.

The Internet of Nouns

I grew up knowing the definition of the word noun. In English, a noun is a word (but not a pronoun) that is used for a person, place, or thing. This is what the Internet of Things gets wrong. IoT is only significant if the network of things is also aware of people and places. Imagine your internet-connected speaker not knowing its location or who your contacts are. Asking for the weather or calling someone would be cumbersome. It’s (or rather IoT’s) utility comes from knowing about nouns. Let me introduce The Internet of Nouns.

ioBridge: Things

I spent a lot of time online back in the mid to late 2000s. With my company, I even traveled the United States helping design and support DSL internet roll-out. I was convinced that web applications were the future of software applications. I built web sites, server software, and prototypes of ideas. I loved following the tech trends and seeing companies try out new things that were chiefly web born. It wasn’t too long before I wanted to try my own ideas out at scale.

My high school friend and business partner, Jason Winters, and I kept up a long conversation about what the future was going to be like. We used to talk for hours almost everyday. Jason’s interests were hardware and mine were software, specifically web apps. Jason joked about how he wished he could wake me up earlier. In those days, I liked to sleep in. I don’t have that luxury now with a four-year-old. Jason gets his day going early. We lived a 1000 miles apart. He would say things like, “It would be funny to turn your lights on when I am ready to talk.”

In 2008, Jason Winters and I left our jobs to create ioBridge. We created hardware integrated with the web. The hardware needed the web, but this means the hardware could leverage the web. We had demos of simple hardware devices using the Google Calculator API. The hardware itself couldn’t even do floating point math, but now had effectively unlimited computational power by being on the web.

Twitter: People

Twitter was the first social network that got my attention… although I had profiles at Friendster and MySpace. I loved the idea of Twitter from the beginning. Obviously Twitter is now a thing that we all know, but back in 2007, Twitter was still trying to figure out what it was. Most people used it for short status updates, like “Hans is eating at Qiznos”, and all of your other followers could react and post their equally uninteresting updates. I couldn’t stop obsessing about it. I joked with Jason… What if my toaster and thermostat were on Twitter.

My friend Jay Huie also kept talking to me about APIs. He impressed upon me how important it was for applications to be able to link to others. In my opinion, this is one reason Twitter took off with developers. Twitter had an API that allowed people to make apps and integrations that were not thought of by Twitter. Twitter is a platform and their functionality and APIs enabled others to build on top. Some used Twitter for marketing. Others used Twitter for news. I used Twitter as place for updates authored by my things.

Foursquare: Location

Some location-based apps came online in the mid the 2000s. I think Foursquare was the company that invented the idea of a check-in. Foursquare leveraged the GPS module in your phone. The Foursquare app knew your raw latitude and longitude and turned that raw info into a place. It knew if you were home or at the bank, moving, or arriving at a restaurant. It knew if your friends were nearby and shared where they checked-in. Foursquare was fun and really interesting to me. They also had APIs.

ThingSpeak: Pulling It All Together

My contribution to the technology mindshare was pulling together parts of social networks, location-based services, and connected things. I built a platform called ThingSpeak. Of course, we had an API for others to build what they wanted to. I used it to build many things. It became my place to try out new combinations of things. Some of those things led to media attention, patents, and anecdotes at parties. I love seeing what others build. As of March 2020, there are over 1 million projects connected to ThingSpeak.

MyToaster: Social Networking for My Toaster

Back in 2008, I used to talk about my toaster being on Twitter. Mostly people asked me what Twitter was and others asked why. I didn’t exactly know at the time, but I thought it was interesting or at least funny to say. I do adore alliteration a lot. I used ioBridge and ThingSpeak to make a socially connected toaster. My toaster only updates its Twitter feed and thousands of followers of its binary state: Toasting or Done Toasting.

And thanks to a mention in Wired magazine, my work moved from fun stories at parties to boardrooms of the top manufacturers of consumer products. Together we have built connected lights, pools, speakers, tide gauges, weather stations, thermostats, air quality stations, garage doors, and you name it.

(I have written about the history of the Internet of Things and MyToaster before if you are interested in learning more about how my toaster kicked off a trend in connected appliances and home automation in the modern era.)

Everything is a Remix

Kirby Ferguson introduced us to the idea that everything is a remix. You innovate by coping things, making changes, and combining things. Understanding the basic elements of creativity and following this simple process will produce some interesting results.

I couldn’t have innovated without everything that came before me. And, my work became an influence for others who came next. And, in reality, there are no actual defined steps: it’s all gradients. Creativity isn’t magic. We all pose the ability to be creative. Bob Dylan’s first album had 11 cover songs on it. He found his voice by copying and the tedious work of experimentation. I recommend Kirby’s Everything is a Remix documentary and TED Talk.

My life changed by combining a few concepts together from trends happening around me. MyToaster on Twitter became my career and a significant turning point in the Internet of Things. So, here’s a special thanks to Twitter and Foursquare. I am forever entangled in this web, but I also look forward to what’s next. I am excited to see what gets created with everything that exists today and with more people understanding the elements of creativity.

So ask yourself… What will you make? What can you only invent? What “dumb” thing can you do? You have your own experiences and interests. Your perspective will yield innovations that only you can produce. I am on the edge of my seat.

The “Slashdot Effect” used to crush our homespun servers and render our projects useless for a period of time. Jason had the idea of moving the “control” part of our projects to the web. If all commands are routed to and from a web server instead of going directly to a device, then we could control which commands went through, secure the connections using SSL, create access lists, and change things on the fly. This idea became our obsession for over a decade with several patents, licenses, open source projects, and customers from all over the world to show for the effort. We still work on large-scale IoT, Internet of Things for short, projects and have helped companies of all sizes reduce costs, predict equipment failures, and bring about connected products that serve a purpose.

When I first heard about Twitter back in 2006, I thought this is a perfect idea for things. Why would a human want to post short statues? Devices have a lot to say. “The HVAC system just turned on.” “The conveyor is drawing 3.1 amps.” “SYSTEM FAILURE: Code 87643.” If a web application could capture these messages, then the messages could be used for analysis. Jason and I started ioBridge in July of 2008 and built a scalable out-of-the-box solution plus a hardware dev kit. The only issue is that we only knew 30 people that were interested in the aquarium project. We sent an email to all 30 people and one person named Pete purchased a dev kit. He built a monitoring system for large aquariums in the Baltimore area. The next wave of users and customers didn’t come until Stephen Myers created an interactive pet treat dispenser for his dog. Stephen didn’t have an aquarium, but he did have a dog. Everything is a remix. Stephen blogged about his project on December 3, 2008, and his project got picked up by “The Unofficial Apple Weblog” since he used the iPhone as the controller.

To demonstrate the idea for a “Twitter for Things” to investors, I created @MyToaster – a Tweeting Toaster that used our system to send status updates about whether or not it was toasting. I followed Stephen’s idea and blogged about the toaster with my article, “Social Networking for My Toaster” on December 8, 2008, and described in detail how to build your own connected appliance. A few days later, Priya Ganapati picked up the story of MyToaster and wrote an article for Wired Magazine. This project and our company… took off.

The toaster allowed me to start conversations with product manufacturers and designers that had ideas for new products. I worked on a number of consumer products and industrial systems that all use the same technology that Jason and I created. The Amazon Echo wouldn’t be possible if the Echo device had to understand all aspects of speech and user intents locally. The web allows Echo to tap into a huge data set that enhances its functionality. ThingSpeak is still going strong. You can still sign up today for a free, non-commercial account and join a community of over 350,000 developers around the world that are all learning about IoT and building new IoT applications.

Fast forward 10 years, and we are still working on the same thing, but the things are now factories, agricultural systems, windmills, and space probes. I was really happy when Katie Blackley from Pittsburgh’s NPR News Station asked me for an interview and an update regarding the MyToaster that started my journey. It has been 10 years and the toaster still works. It is now outfitted with a Particle Photon and uses the ThingSpeak web service to update its thousands of followers. I am glad she reached out to me as it caused me to reflect a bit about the journey and prompted me to share my history of the Internet of Things.

Appendix: MyToaster

MyToaster has been popular on its own for a long time. I have gotten requests to talk about the toaster on news stations, interviews for magazines, and to have the toaster brought to IoT conferences. Every trade show we did had MyToaster on display. The “touring toaster” was a stand-in and took a lot of abuse over the years.

Another significant event for MyToaster is when the Washington Post posted an infographic on “The Marriage of Appliance and Internet“.

They listed that MyToaster from 2008 was a significant event that shaped “Connected Appliances” and “Consumer Internet of Things Products”.

2008 – @mytoaster joins Twitter. It’s a toaster that Tweets. Hans Scharler rigged up his toaster to his Twitter so the appliance Tweets one of two things: Toasting or Done Toasting.

A man in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has rigged his toaster to tweet “Toasting” or “Done Toasting” with each use, and — despite the account’s lack of variety — has gained more than 2,000 followers.

In order to further connect us with our possessions, Scharler and his friend Jason Winters created a platform for developers called ThingSpeak— a sort of Twitter for things — that lets objects send messages, broadcast their location, graph their temperature, and more.

–Jacob Davidson / Time

“Tweeting appliances speaks to this whole ‘internet of things’ idea,” says Hans Scharler, a tech consultant who also writes comedy material. “If your appliances were outputting information, it can always go to a database. But we love to share information. So why not find a way to do that?” Scharler found online fame for his twittering toaster, whose tweets alternate between “toasting” and “toast is done.” @mytoaster has about 200 twitter followers.

–Priya Ganapati / Wired

They listed that MyToaster from 2008 was a significant event that shaped Connected Appliance and the Consumer Internet of Things Products.

2008 – @mytoaster joins Twitter. It’s a toaster that Tweets. Hans Scharler rigged up his toaster to his Twitter so the appliance Tweets one of two things: Toasting or Done Toasting.

My Tweeting Toaster is a step in the self-aware direction for appliances. This Ziggy cartoon made me smile, but it also made me realize the inevitability of social objects and the Internet of Things and then Skynet. Hmm, and Ziggy was the name of the computer in Quantum Leap…

[via gocomics.com]

Aux Etats-Unis, un petit génie a eu l’idée de lier son grille-pain à un compte Twitter pour que celui-ci publie des status comme « Toasting » ou « done toasting », lorsque son propriétaire prépare son petit-déjeuner.

A Pittsburgh man has wired up his toaster to his Twitter so that the appliance automatically tweets “Toasting” and “Done Toasting”—and nothing but that—every morning.

MyToaster boasts an impressive number of followers (almost 1,500) for merely tweeting “Toasting” and “Done Toasting” every morning, and each tweet gets retweeted by at least a handful of followers. For many people, these tweets comprise the best two minutes of the day.

[via Mashable]