Twitter for Tots? A New Toy Lets Little Ones Tweet

 
Sometimes when I browse the Internet, I find an article that just makes me pause and say, "Wow."  Here's one from Wired.com called "Twoddler Toy Lets Toddlers Tweet."

In case you may be questioning the story's veracity, here's a screenshot of the official site for Twoddler:

According to this site, Twoddler was created by researchers at Hasselt University in Belgium as part of a course in mobile and pervasive computing. 

This excerpt from the Wired article explains the concept of the toy and how it translates kids' activities into tweets:

"Twoddler is a modified Fisher Price activity center, the kind that toddlers have tweaked and poked for what seems like generations. The difference is that this one has its activities monitored by a computer and the activities are translated into Tweets. The example uses a baby called Yorin, and if he spends, say, a few minutes playing with a picture of his mother, this Tweet will be forced on the world: '@mommy_yorin Yorin misses mommy and looks forward playing with her this evening.' Further, if he annoyingly bangs on the bell, over and over, for far too long, the computer will translate this to say 'Yorin is showing off his music skills with a new tune.'"

The video below, produced by the research team responsible for Twoddler's creation, shows the toy in action (although I will say that I was unable to find a version of this video that had audio included):

Twoddler: Twittering Toddlers from Bart Swennen on Vimeo.

While, as far as I can tell, this toy isn't yet available to the public, its ability to monitor and tweet the activities of toddlers can be used to serve several purposes:

a) to let parents monitor their childrent's activities and feel closer to their kids when separated from them

b) to get kids accustomed to the idea of social media/broadcasting their activities to others

c) to collect data on how kids are using the toy (e.g., which features are most frequently used, how often the toy is being played with, etc.)

Option A is probably the most innocuous, option B is kinda disturbing, and option C may just be the next evolution of consumer data collection.

What's your take on Twoddler?  Would you get one for your child?  Discuss.