Twitter is everywhere these days. Well, at least it seems that way.
With many states in the country debating new texting while driving laws, it appears that Ford is taking a step to help Twitter- addicts avoid a ticket and drive safely. The car company will introduce an application that will read Twitter messages to you while driving. The application is one of three that will be introduced by the auto giant during today’s presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show.
The application would be part of the next-generation Sync in-car communication system. The application is called OpenBeak and is built on a previous application called TwitterBerry.
The other two are music-based progams, according to USA Today. The first is the Internet rado service, Pandora and the other is Stitcher, would would allow on-demand radio in your car.
“It’s about bringing the Internet to the car,” said Charles Golvin, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “What they’re doing is making it really easy.”
Sync, co-created with Microsoft, is a system that lets drivers operate their Bluetooth-enabled smartphones and music players with voice commands and have text messages read to them, among other functions. Since Sync was unveiled three years ago, Ford has sold more than 1 million vehicles with it.
Drivers won’t be able to compose tweets (though that may come), but the system reads them as they stream in. Even at that, some tech watchers question its value.
Listening to tweets can be distracting to drivers, says Phil Leigh of Inside Digital Media.
He says the more potent applications are likely to be Pandora and Stitcher. “If you have Pandora, you don’t need satellite radio,” Leigh says.
Pandora’s founder is thrilled. Listeners in cars “is kind of the Holy Grail for us,” Tim Westergren says. “Half of all radio listening happens in the car.”
Adds Stitcher co-founder Noah Shanok: “This is huge for us.”
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