Coffee and the internet - full circle

Back in the early days of the internet when web pages had a grey background by default (really), I came across the Trojan Room Coffee Pot. It was a (what we now call) web camera pointing at a coffee machine. The idea was that you could see if there was any coffee in the pot from your workstation (this was before PCs were mainstream) without having to go to it. In fact the setup predates the World Wide Web.

Fourteen years later when my Firefox browser starts I see this message from Phil, a colleague, on Twitter:

Phil77 morning all, going to see if water's now boiled for coffee. Didn't notice boiler was off on first attempt #wycliffeuk
7 minutes ago

and I know that if I go to the kitchen I should find that the water boiler has reached temperature.

So the internet has come full circle, our need for coffee (well, not really a need) has been met with technology. The difference between twitter and the Trojan Room Coffee pot is that twitter is more versatile. For example, our Wycliffe UK twitter account can tell you things like

wycliffeuk Engage summer teams are almost full. If you're still thinking of applying please contact us immediately! http://is.gd/6AW0

Like the coffee technology, it's very time sensitive information, so if you're reading this anytime after mid-March then you are probably too late.