You know Twitter can alert you to many things in 140 characters or less, but are you ready for it to notify you when your baby’s diaper is wet?
News that a brand-new online tool could do just that had lots of people talking on Thursday, but it turns out the app is not coming to an iTunes store near you.
Here’s what’s creating all the buzz:
Huggies Brazil is preparing to launch TweetPee -- a new iPhone app designed to help parents keep track of the amount of diapers they use and let them reorder online when their supply is running low, said Eric Bruner, a spokesman for Kimberly-Clark, the parent company of Huggies.
Four parents in Brazil are now testing the app – a process that includes the use of a small, owl-shaped sensor that can be clipped to a baby’s nappy. The gadget “measures the change in humidity in proximity to the diaper,” Bruner said. If it senses a change, the app sends a text message or a tweet to the parents that the baby has peed.
The company has even created a webpage dedicated to explaining how it works (in Portuguese), but the gizmo is not destined for mass production.
“The clip-on humidity sensor is intended merely as a concept device to help showcase these… parents' experience with the app,” Bruner told TODAY Moms.
“It will not be made available for purchase, nor are we suggesting parents are unable or too busy to notice when their babies' diapers need changing.”
Bruner wasn’t sure whether the device existed before the test or was created specifically for Huggies, adding only that the company worked on the gadget for a number of months.
The TweetPee app will be launched in Brazil in July. Bruner did not know whether it would be made available in the U.S. or anywhere else outside Brazil.
That's not stopping a stream of of jokes and speculation, with AdWeek suggesting a product called "TweetPoop" might be more useful to parents than TweetPee. Apparently the idea of Twitter alerts for wet diapers is not so ridiculous that some people didn't take it seriously, reacting either with outrage about lazy parenting... or with sheepish interest.
"If they work on cloth diapers I'll take one," one mom commented on AdWeek's article. "It might help me get my big boy potty trained."