Have ArcMap Use Twitter When Scripts Are Finished
I remember years ago having ArcInfo Workstation send emails when it was finished processing and I’ve always thought the next logical step was having it send a text message to my cell phone. Rafa Gutierrez looked at Twitter for alerts and posted instructions as to how to get your ArcMap Model to send you a tweet when it is finished running. I’d probably set up a separate private Twitter account so that people can’t see what I’m doing or that I’d spam followers with my overlay analysis.
Letting ArcMap send you tweets
Finally – a productive use for Twitter!
I’m a little conflicted about this. I mean, it’s awesome, don’t get me wrong. I have monitoring services that email me when IMS goes down and python that writes a text file on the network when scripts complete successfully, so I’m all about notification.
But if I’m at the mall returning my Christmas tree light-up socks that my brother-in-law gave me, what am i going to do about my model back on the server at work? Isn’t an email when i sit down to work good enough?
when are notifications T.M.I.?
Well I suppose if you can’t sleep through the night not knowing that your geoprocessing model ran….
Last thing I want to know when I’m sitting down to enjoy a bowl and Cops on TV is that my model is finished running. I personally think integration of work and life is a bad, bad trend.
I’m guessing if you didn’t want to know when the script was finished, you wouldn’t bother sending yourself a notification?
Consider future workflows where the notification isn’t meant for you, the human, but for agents on the web. Your agents, customer agents. Twitter is just one more way to implement events and subscribers web-wide.
cool (sort of) I guess although not really that useful – perhaps good for an internal twitter group that monitor’s a group’s activities but personally, I couldn’t really care if your model was finished running
Funny. The whole reason I made this was to work less, or at least, more efficiently. I was finding myself wondering when my models were done so I could plan when to run back in to the office and start the next model. I found myself wasting trips back and forth and worse, bringing my work home. I suppose I was obsessing about it too much. But now, I just wait for the message. BTW, it sends an SMS since Twitter’s Direct Messaging allows for phone updates.
I think Sean makes a good point. I would subscribe to a few data providers’ tweets to know when their data got updated.
I hadn’t thought of that. I was just coming from the leave-work-at-work mentality.
How about heading to the pub for a pint while waiting for your model to finish?
“I gotta run guys, my model just tweeted that it was done”
now that’s useful ;0)
Actually, having a separate twitter acct for your ArcGIS manager would make sense.. notify about scripts finished running, new data layers, contract info, meet at the pub etc… the sky is the limit.
It would be interesting if you could also have ArcGIS “listen” for tweets. That way you could twitter something and kick off a process.
AA
Then I would never have to leave the pub…er, home.
I read rastamoufastah (raster move faster). sadly, I was mistaken.
This is just another nifty way to use Twitter! I have been involved with processing tens of thousands of images at a time and have had to set up scripts that would send an email to me and whoever else was interested in the progress (i.e. the Project Manager who has to send the bill to the client and my boss who asked every day why it was taking so long). An email that was generated after every few hundred emails gave us a pretty good indication of what was going on with the batch…I suppose I could have just as easily posted it to a Twitter account and sent the private URL around! Now…what would really be cool would be to see the progress from the office in Texas vs. the office in Georgia updated automatically to a list that my stakeholders could access.
We’ve just started to tweet when beta builds of our product are uploaded (http://twitter.com/FMEBetaBuilder) I’m thinking from there to the product itself tweeting is just a short step away.