Twitter Pizza…
ijustine twittered that she wished twitter were edible. And perhaps in the not too distant future it will be.
If you don’t know what twitter is, that’s ok. Most of the rest of this is probably not going to make specific sense, though you can probably gather bits and pieces of info from it.
You may already know that twitter has the ability to store location information in it. That is the basic premise in how twittervision works, people set a location for where they are twittering from, and twittervision pulls that up and mashes it up into a google world map to display whatever you twitter.
You probably are aware that twitter can work with your aim, msn, yahoo, google talk, or jabber account to give you messages from your friends (in twitter) without having to have a chat or message session open with them. In a sense it aggregates messages from all of them for you.
One of the things that happens when you befriend someone in Twitter is that the person you befriend is notified that you have befriended them. They may, or may not, choose to befriend you back.
Ok, one of the scripting tools that is out there that will talk with a variety of IM services, including Jabber, is Python-Twisted. Perl also has an interface to Jabber, as well as a few other services. In any case, both are well suited to taking messages as text and handling them for other tools.
There is a Perl script that will allow you to order Pizza without you having to pick up a phone, or anything like that. From what I understand it works with Papa John’s Pizza, which I believe means it only works in the US, and even here you may have areas without support. Likewise if you prefer some other delivery, because of the flavor of their sauce, or the variety of pizza dough, etc. you’re probably out of luck as well. In any case I am pretty sure that the general means of working with the script is that you either edit a .rc file for the script, telling it where you are (and other ‘default’ information) and it uses a form filling process to order the pizza for you through the website at Papa John’s Pizza. That forwards your request to the appropriate delivery store for your location, and 15-45 min later (or longer) you’re greeted at the door by your pizza delivery driver.
So if I were to want to set up a service where I could go to twitter and let my agent know that I wanted something to eat, I would start by setting up an agent to monitor my Twitter account for friend subscriptions. Anyone I didn’t know already I would suggest that if they would like to use my services, that I would appreciate it if they would fill out a short web form, which would include their location information in a form that Papa John’s (or other pizza or food delivery companies) can use for delivery. I may include a few varieties of pizza that the subscriber may select as their favorite, as well as the correct size of that pizza (for pizza service, similar for Chinese delivery, or sandwiches) and then validate that I get food delivered for them. I may also include a request for work address. Some bare minimum of that goes into a separate file related to their account, and the agent adds the subscriber as a friend.
At that point the subscriber can send a private twitter message to the agent, requesting a food order. Twitter processes the order and sends it off to the appropriate delivery company. Presumably that company would give the agent the cost of the order, as well as an estimate of when the order will be delivered. That gets sent back to the subscriber in a private twitter message from the agent.
Along the way there may be a way for companies and individuals who want to deliver food to subscribe as a service to the agent. The agent would ask for things like delivery radius, or map, some sort of a menu, hours of operation, methods of payment from subscribers here, and the like. So your local grocer could decide to offer soup and sandwiches that they deliver daily at lunch time. Subscribers confirm that they are in the delivery area at lunch time, and may elect to have a standing order, a sandwich of the day, perhaps subscribe for a week or month at a time for a discount, or even provide a custom schedule.
Along the way, perhaps open-id is used to let the user pre-store information that might be relevant. Also it may be used in some sort of introduction service that allows the subscriber to bypass the agent and work directly with the delivery service.
It’s just a thought. Not much more than an extension of my own thought of setting up a Python-Twisted script to accept my twitter friend’s messages through Jabber and forward them to my AIM account at work when I am logged in there, or other systems when I am logged in elsewhere.
