TweeCards: Tweets Go Postal

The US Postal Service is running a large deficit due to dropping demand for first-class mail services; Twitter is a popular social networking site with no current way to monetize fully its user-generated content; and the computer industry always needs new demand for its storage, networking, and imaging products. Prior work has ignored the possibility of solving all of these problems with one mechanism; we see these problems as creating a holistic challenge. Social networking, especially when the application is aimed at enticing teenagers to spend their parents’ money, creates privacy challenges. In particular, the real names and addresses of Twitter users should not be exposed to the people they follow. Through the application of on-demand printing technology, a widely-deployed content delivery network [2], QR codes for embedding machine-readable references to URLs, cloud computing, and privacy-preservation software based on the universally applicable DHT mechanism, we see a new opportunity to combine the burgeoning field of social networking with the time-honored thrill of receiving post cards. Prior approaches (e.g., Apple iCards and get@#%&&ter.com) provide much less dynamic solutions to the problem, and, besides, they fail to meet the bromidic test of using a DHT.