In my experience, cat owners are serial ‘Tweeters’ often don’t go together. It seems to me that people who consider their every mundane thought interesting enough to post on the internet just aren’t the kind of people who take to looking after and caring for a cat. Sony, however, think differently. Sony seem to believe that cats and Twitter got together so well that their Computer Science Laboratories have actually invented a life-logging tool designed for cats…

That’s correct; a collar is fitted with a camera, a GPS monitor and even an accelerometer, then attached to a cat and used to communicate with Twitter, to update the world about what the cat is doing. The collar can tell whether the cat is walking around, eating or resting and, let’s be honest, does anybody post anything more interesting than that on Twitter? Apparently the camera also recognises the faces of others cats, though I am dubious about how well this would work.

At the moment there are around a dozen phrases the collar can tweet, along the lines of “This is tasty” when the cat is eating. As if anybody could care! As a piece of social networking, this is nonsense. However, as a cat owner, I do see some advantages… I’m not always at home, for example, and it would be nice to check my cats’ tweets to make sure they are getting enough food, exercise and rest as they should be. It would also be very handy to know exactly where they are, on the countless occasions when they’ve gone AWOL! I wonder if it’ll bring the pet insurance down if I can prove I can trace my cat’s every movement…