14 DAY TRIAL // Ever wondered what it would be like if the beer tap at your favored bar could use Twitter? The stories it would tell? Neither have we, but the enterprising people at the 360i digital marketing agency in New York have and in fact turned it to reality. They gave the beer tap at their newly inaugurated in-house bar a voice and set it loose in Twitterland.
This latest electronic bartender was designed to keep some of the charm of real flesh-and-blood ones and @tweetingbar will tweet a witty remark like "124 glasses of beer in the keg, 124 glasses of beer... pour one out, pass it about, 123 glasses of beer in the keg..." every time a beer is poured. But it handles some of the maintenance duties as well, letting everyone know when the keg needs a refill and also reminding visitors to tip the bartender.
This wasn't just for fun and games though, since actually making it work required some technical know-how and custom hardware and software, but in the end it was a success. The company described the whole process from idea to realization on their blog.
“It was a Friday evening at digital agency 360i’s New York offices and employees were gathered around the company’s newly-completed bar. The beer was flowing – and so were the ideas, as they often are at 360i. “If cats can tweet, why can’t taps?” 360i CEO Bryan Wiener wondered.” says a fragment of the blog entry.
A little bit of research led them to Keg-Meter, a company that makes flow measuring devices, and after some persuasion they got it to build a custom device with a serial port attachment. Then a team of in-house developers worked out the software part of the project and before long:
“It worked! Characters appeared on the laptop screen each time a draft was drawn. The tap could now make noise, even if he didn’t have anything to say yet. Each time Mike and Tim pulled a draft, new random characters appeared on the screen. Though the tap’s lexicon was painfully limited, this was the consistency – and promise – they’d hoped to see. It was now time to configure the server and software.”
