Abstract-Despite the availability of the sensor and smartphone devices to fulfill the ubiquitous computing vision, thestate-of-the-art falls short of this vision. We argue that the reason for this gap is the lack of an infrastructure to task/utilize these devices for collaboration. We propose that Twitter can provide an "open" publish-subscribe infrastructure for sensors and smartphones, and pave the way for ubiquitous crowd-sourced sensing and collaboration applications. We design and implement a crowd-sourced sensing and collaboration system over Twitter, and showcase our system in the context of two applications: a crowd-sourced weather radar, and a participatory noise-mapping application. Our results from real-world Twitter experiments give insights into the feasibility of this approach and outlines the research challenges in sensor/smartphone integration to Twitter.
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