“PCB’s are on the way… still having trouble w/ 1.8 firmware” (61 characters)

Most opensource hardware projects with mediawiki installations have status/news updates hand pasted into the main wiki page.  Why go to all the trouble when you could just use twitter?  The biggest open source hardware project in this dimension even tweets.

Why not use the twitter api to allow teams to tweet the status of their projects? Doing so would allow users of the project to track updates by simply following the status… ???

The twitter api doesn’t allow for the programmatic creation of accounts.  Probably a smart move on twitter’s part given the potential for exploitation.  Without this feature twitter integration on the project level is a no go - if I can’t create an account automatically for the project then the whole process of micro-blogging project status becomes an immense pain in the ass.  “If you would like to notifiy followers of your project of the status of development… please go to twitter.com and click sign up… then paste your twitter username and password into the…” meh.

A Note On Oversharing:

There is no such thing as oversharing when working with a team.  From my experience the problem is undersharing. Status updates on UnPtnt are designed to reverse this trend of hacker undersharing.  Writing this post, I realize there is a certain opportunity cost involved with a full blog post; not the case with a 140 character fragment/tweet/micropost.  If UnPtnt users get in the habit of updating the status regularly the community will end up with fewer stale projects and more participation (theory!)

Project feed page.