Puppy Tweets
Though it had been around for a while before then, 2011 was the year that Twitter first started popping off for all sorts of reasons, and that means brands started taking notice. One of those brands was the toy giant Mattel, which that year released PuppyTweets, a gadget that promised to let your dog take part in the new hotness that was Twitter Dot Com.
In practice, PuppyTweets is just a plastic tag hooked up to an associated Twitter account that you, the owner, set up. When then tag detects some sort of jostling or barking, it randomly posts one of 500 different canned doggy tweets to that account: something like “woof,” or “bark,” I’d assume. At the time, Mattel Brands President Neil Friedman said that the product was “a new frontier,” in the world of human-pet interaction. But really, PuppyTweets is just a way to inflict the unique hell of the world’s worse social network onto your poor hapless pup.
