One of the things that’s been making me happiest recently has been the fact that Jodrell Bank’s telescopes have been Twittering. These big machines, peering into the cosmos, chattering to themselves about where they’re currently pointed – and that chatter is overheard and reproduced on the web. Obligatory screengrab, in case Twitter is down:

It’s cute, and adds to the growing number of non-humans burbling away on Twitter. As I thought about this, it became clear that Twitter isn’t just “the status message turned into communication” (as I usually describe it), but a human-readable messaging bus.