Twitter gets an awful lot of criticism as being a useless waste of time, but a friend just tweeted about something that I reckon is the most brilliant use of the technology ever: a tweeting oven called BakerTweet. Now confession first: this isn’t new. In fact, the BakerTweet was installed last year. But this is the first I’ve heard of it and it reminded me just how fantastic technology can be.

The idea is simple enough. You run a bakery, people like your crumbly delights, so how do you let them know a fresh batch of pain au chocolats are fresh out of the oven? You could send out alerts via a Twitter client on a mobile or laptop, but that’s easy to forget. And besides, that phone is going to be covered in flour within days.

Poke, the company behind BakerTweet, set it all up using an open-source CMS, a Linksys Wi-Fi adapter and various bits of electronics and interfaces. Whenever something fresh comes out of the oven, the bakers select what it is from a pre-made list and press the button: tweet sent. The bakers can also customise the message as they see fit.

I spoke to Poke’s sound and creative director Nik Roope earlier today, and he emphasised it was very much a labour of love. “It was purely selfish in a way. We’re across the road from the Albion’s Oven bakery and were having a chat at lunch, wondering if they had anything fresh from the oven – but there was no way to know.”

So, rather than follow the time-honoured recipe of despatching your youngest team member to go and check, they instead dedicated their own time to building a device that could tell them from scratch.

“It was genuinely just for fun,” said Nik. “One of our engineering staff had been playing with this Arduino kit, a RAD platform, and we thought we’d have a tinker.”

Though what lies at BakerTweet’s heart is specialist electronics, some of it falls under the cobbled-together category. In particular, the knob is from a cooker, while the box is a standard catering case.

So what next? “We’re talking to a chocolatier and a zoo,” said Nik, raising some curious images. While he admitted that both projects are complicated and may never come to fruition, it’s this sort of brilliant thinking – combining cutting-edge technology with highly localised services – that highlights just what the likes of Twitter can do.