Bathroom Scale Tweets Your Weight
Thomas Petty on 11 12, 2009
It’s a new world, baby, and our appliances are becoming Twitter-aware. Withings has a WiFi-enabled bathroom scale that will tweet your weight, calculated body mass index (BMI) and lean and fat mass to the world.
The upside to this $159 sleek bathroom scale is that it will track all your weight in an online system that even comes with an iPhone app. That’s quite handy so you don’t have to deal with transcribing your data into a pesky spreadsheet and generating graphs for yourself. It’s all online for you to track, monitor and chart over the long haul. Very nice.
But should I be telling the world about my weight? My first visceral reaction to this is, “Why do I need to broadcast to the world the most intimate daily details of my life, like my weight? Honestly, how could anyone really care?” Just like the TV commercial with the dad tweeting, “I’m sitting on the back porch.” Who the hell cares?
The reality is that no one really cares what I weigh or that my BMI went down a point. But, looking at their blog just today, there was a comment from someone who has been encouraged by their friends because of the tweets from their scale. So maybe that’s a good thing.
But do our appliances need to be communicating to the world like this? It seems that Twitter is the universal communicator, because you can now connect your phone to Twitter and then to your Facebook account with all your friends, LinkedIn with all your business contacts, and well, the thousands of followers you have on Twitter. Should my toaster tweet that the toast is popped up? This of course would then show up on Twitterific on my iPhone. Maybe I care about my toast being ready, but does the rest of the world?
Reverse Voyeurism
Voyeurism comes from the French word “voyeur”, which means “one who watches”. I call this phenomenon “reverse voyeurism” because we allow the world to watch the intimate minutiae of our lives. It’s all online, and why should our weight, sex lives or anything else be any different?
Yes, this intimate, super-connected world of ours allows us to instantly communicate at any time with anyone, many of whom we’ve never met and never will. Google Wave even allows you to watch as your friends type letter by letter and backspace over mistakes. Google is busy gobbling up all this massive amount of data in its index, until one day, they will have all the data they need on each of us to become a Star Trek reality.
“Computer, can you please tell me what Thomas Petty weighed on September 23, 2009?”
Personally, I would be hard pressed to pay $159 for a scale that will tell the world what I weigh (I can do that myself for free). I recently lost 25 pounds (after months of working at it), and I felt that was a milestone worthy to share with my friends on Facebook. I think they would have become very tired of endless tweets about my fractional daily loss over several months to the point that it would have all been lost in the noise.
What are your thoughts?
Read more from Thomas Petty at: Bay Area Search Engine Academy and on Twitter
Thomas Petty is President of the Bay Area Search Engine Academy. He teaches SEO and internet marketing classes in the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento, California.
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Wonderful post as always Thomas!
It is going to be a scary day when Google decides to flip the data switch on and open up all of our lives to the world. But I guess with our openness and transparency on sites like Twitter, Facebook and other social networks, we are really doing this ourselves right now. At least we have control over what we allow others to see. For now…
If you believe the doomsday-sayers (and I don’t), Google will someday become self-aware. In the immortal words of Sara Connor in Terminator 2, “Anyone not wearing 2 million sun block is going to have a really bad day!”
Google is amassing an enormous amount of data about the human race and each of us individually. It is becoming the encyclopedia of the world we live in, and we willingly feed it all the data it needs.
I am speechless! I may willingly feed Google plenty of data but tweeting my weight, my BMI . . . not a hope!
There is transparency and then there is privacy.
I suppose if I were a part of a weight loss group then it would be great to celebrate my friend’s successes along the way but that is the only reason that I can see for anyone using this scale.
Very interesting subject. I read with great pleasure.