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It has been a while since I evangelized Twitter—I’ve been up to my earlobes in Bloomington Startup Weekend organizing and graduate school—but a tweet this evening came through the information stream that is noteworthy for two reasons.

First, wiki prince and AboutUs.org developer Mark Dilley mentioned the creation of TweetSpeak, a command line program for Mac OSX that leverages the text-to-speech engine to have Twitter content spoken. Written in perl, it works nicely from a double-click and keyboard launch through TextMate, itself a great programming tool for the Mac. Mark is keeping track of initial reactions on the AboutUs blog.

Second, the developer of the script is Ward Cunningham, founder of the wiki and currently working on the AboutUs.org wiki Internet directory. As of January 17, Ward is now using Twitter.

A different delivery channel
Before launching TweetSpeak, edit the script (near the top) to make sure your user account is being used. Listening to the constant stream of the context-deficient public stream is maddening. It is also a good idea to comment out the vocal feedback that says “tweet tweet” every time the script runs through a listening cycle. Initially, it was reassuring to know it was running, but that quickly became old. There is also the problem of the initial barrage of the past 20 tweets when starting up. It wouldn’t take much of a hack to have it skip that first round if you don’t want Victoria and Alex, the somewhat stilted mechanical voices, chanting for a minute. Once that was done, it became a nice new way to receive new Twitter posts.

There are some potential issues with using this method of delivery.

• It is important to turn off other notifications. With Growl, Adium, Twitterrific and now TweatSpeak all trying to alert me to a new tweet, the ambient quality of Twitter is blasted away.
• I need to keep Twitterrific running, though, because TweakSpeak is a one-way channel—I can receive, but not send.
• I am not one to have sound running on my Mac, as a rule, because I don’t want to disturb others around me. TweatSpeak, then, becomes a more communal alert. That can be a problem for those who are (a) not following as many people as I am, or (b) receiving those same tweets on their own desktops. Twitter doesn’t work as well as a communal stream because it removes the ability of the individual to turn of noise. Everybody has to listen to the same thing.
• Listening is a completely different cognitive process than reading. You can’t ignore the message in the moment, as you can when you are reliant on reading. With Twitterrific, I can let the tweets go by in busy times, or I can choose to stop what I am doing and take a second or two to read the brief pop-up message. With TweetSpeak, I must interrupt my work for a moment and concentrate on what Victoria and Alex are saying. If I miss that moment, I am back to reading, not listening.
• As impressive as the text-to-speech technology is—Alex, a new voice for Leopard, is pretty smooth—it still can’t pronounce my name correctly. Understandable, since Amy and I made it up from our initials, but still annoying. Also, most usernames are meant to be seen, not heard.

I will probably keep it on. If it gets too socially awkward or intrusive, mute is only a button click away.