My Dogs Are Barking

My Dogs Are Barking

The annual Toy Fair International is going on in New York right now. Now, I don't think most people know of this expo, but since I'm a nerd and some part of nerdom is collecting crap that is otherwise considered stuff for little kids, this is information that I just happen to know even though I haven't bought any "action figure" in a very long while.

The nice thing about Toy Fair is that you get a glimpse of the future in the stores. Most of all, you get to see what could potentially be the hot toy for Christmas. Yes, it may only be March, but to the people who are crafting up to take your money, it's already Christmas before Easter ever hits. So perhaps you should take note on this new toy that will be out in time for Christmas as your kids will be asking for it.



Well, I must disappoint you. Scientists have created no such collar. But one of the world’s largest toy companies, Mattel Inc, has made something even better: Puppy Tweets. Yes. You read that right. Twitter. For dogs.

Yes, you read that right. Twitter. For dogs. Well, it's called Puppy Tweets(TM). Yes, that's right. It's a god damn twitter based toy so social networking will be a major part of this useless Pokemon/digi-pet sort of thing. What does it do? Well, dog owners will just die happy now that they realize that their dog will be wearing a collar that randomly tweets into their own Doggie twitter account random things.

Wait. You must be thinking that this will allow your dog to talk or something. Send messages as to his current mood or where he be at, yo. No. No it wont. You should talk to your little child now and clear this up before they have a case of hopeful eyes like I did when I was a little kid and saw Back to the Future II and thought hover boards were just around the corner.

What Puppy Tweets(TM) does is sit on your pets collar and with a tag that has integrated motion and sound sensors on the dog's collar connects to a USB receiver. It comes with easy-to-use software, which is short speak to say that you will more than likely call one of the Geek Squad people over to install this, then after paying that huge tech support bill your dog is now connected to his own Twitter account.



So what does his twitter account do other than take up space on the internet and has all of two followers? It monitors what your dog does, which most likely is sleep, interprets these actions and then sends humorous tweets to the account. It's not reading the dogs mind. It's just randomly coming up with pre-set messages.

What would be the interesting things a dog would even say? Well.. I have no idea. When your daily life consist of sleeping,e eating, pooping, barking at small woodland animals and begging for one of the previous mentioned items.. and sometimes wanting a belly rub, I have no idea what sort of topic this animal can really provide. Here's the examples of the tweets:

"Guess what I'm licking right now?"

Oh boy.. could it be your balls?

"I finally caught that tail I've been chasing, and.... OOUUCCH!!"

Well gee, I'm sure glad that I set up my twitter account to follow this..

"I bark because I miss you. There, I said it. Now hurry home."

I can't wait for Kibbles and Bits to team up with them and have the tweets be advertisements. Nothing like your dog tweeting that they want some Kibbles and Bits brand dog food.



This is just the start of it. Mattel Brands President Neil Friedman told the soon to be dead L.A. Times that they think this could be the start of a new wave of products for people to interact with their pets. Again, how is it interacting with your pet? You're looking at your Twitter feed and see that your dog's collar randomly generated a message. Maybe you should have been fucking playing with your dog instead of spending your time online or looking at your phone to see who just tweeted.

So what's the damage to your wallet? $30 seems to get you this randomly tweeting machine you strap around your pet. You know what, don't even bother. With that money you could probably buy your dog some real food that isn't crap ground up and passed as nutritional substances.



Of course Cat owners are beyond pissed at this whole slap in the face by Mattel. Mattel has answered these spinsters call. While they would not say whether Kitty Tweets is on the way, they have said that this is indeed the beginning. Why start with dogs? They said that dogs get into more trouble while their owners are away at work.

This may be true, given the nature of cats to sleep, but just imagine how much extra income your average crazy cat lady has to spend considering she doesn't have any children to spend the money on. Mittens sure would look cute with some stupid tweeting collar.

Either way, these things are stupid plastic toys that are going to do nothing but become boring after all the predetermined generated tweets are cycled through on the twitter account that no one will want to follow no matter how annoying you are in pushing it on others.

But hey, I'm sure your kid will never forgive you if it's not under the tree this year. And if you don't have a pet you know you're also going to be asked for that puppy. So Costco should at least make a two pack of these items.