140 characters is a great packet standard for optimized communication. With more and more services being layered in on the api, a day will come when more data than we ever thought imaginable could be contained in a Twitter message. Commercial industry never had a reason to optimize in this way, Now that market share is created and competed upon based on how much utility can be provided to the consumer, we have crowd-sourced efficiency on a very interesting scale.

I'm working on a little project right now to power a friend's interface and I decided to use Twitter as the back end data transfer protocol. The twitter messages are more useful than I ever thought possible. I was intending to send single tweets of human readable location, user and link data. Once these were sent, the archiving and feed capabilities provided a static, cloud based reference. I no longer needed to store the data on the user in my cloud, the data was stored in the feed. On crash of the application, or even loss of the remote device, no data was ever lost.

Expect to find this method on the rovers, shuttles and Virgle days ahead.