Ask HN: what would you do if every license plate was a Twitter account? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: what would you do if every license plate was a Twitter account?

3 pointsMichiel7 comments

While stuck in traffic we were discussing internet in the car and I got an idea: what if the license plate of each car was also a Twitter account? So @NL45-FDX-2 for instance, it should be unique if you prefix the country code.

But I didn't come up with that many ideas, other then: send traffic information to car, warn driver about speeding, send driver a confirmation of a ticket (after driving through red or too fast), flirt with girl in other lane.

Any other ideas (maybe involving geolocation) or is this just silly?

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Sounds like a great idea, but why limit to twitter- and you will probably run into some cases where usernames are already taken. Why not just create a site to report nuts drivers by license number. Then parents, etc. could look on it for their license number to see what their kids are up to. This would be a lot easier than the solutions that involve additions to cars to track their children. Then hook it up to twitter, facebook, etc. Of course, there are probably already sites that do this, but maybe you could do it better.

No need to create a site, all tweets to a license plate end up in the public timeline anyway.

There is already a startup that does this: http://venturebeat.com/2010/09/15/demo-bump-social-network-c...

Cool, I didn't know that!

But from what I read I understand that it's tied to a telephone (app) and not to the car. In what way would the concept be improved if you could message the car and its driver (and passengers), instead of the phone.

IMHO, just another distraction to boost the number of car accidents...

Think more about safety and less about texting.

I understand your concern, but I'd rather focus on the positive. With text to speech technology the driver doesn't need to take his/her eyes off the road.

So what _safety_ features would be possible with this?

It's understandable that you'd rather focus on the positive, but you have to respond to the negative.

Text to speech would be a good feature for this service, but it's not at the point where it's easy to compose tweets with license plate numbers and character restrictions yet.

In any case, this service would involve people taking their attention (one or more of mind, eyes, and thumbs) off of driving to send and receive tweets. Any safety features would have to outweigh this detriment.

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