Printers are old ugly monsters from the last century.
Twitter is about 6 years old and might shop for school pretty soon.

How would you put the two together?
In this post twitter is used to access the printer and to request information and services.

The idea is simple. Nowadays printers can easily connected to network. By implementing a twitter connector  in the printer, the machine will understand how to communicate with the twitter server and then becomes ’twitter enabled’. The diagram below depicts the idea.

The twitter connector takes care of talking to the twitter server and translate the Tweets/DMs into printer languages.

With the printer’s “twittability” enabled, one can register a twitter id as a proxy and connect the id to the printer.
Once connected, the proxy will receive and send Tweets/DMs on behalf of the printer.
In this way the Twitter enabled printers offer user an easier yet more powerful option to access and control:

• No extra software installation is required. Any twitter client on any platform, or the twitter webpage, will work.
• Status report is accessible in tweets even when the printer is offline.
• Printers post and “read” tweets and direct messages, which can be further customized, acting like human.

Would it be more interesting if you can talk to your printers like this?

A demo has been built to show how to talk to a twitter enabled printer: