So I got a set of WootOff lights in the mail from woot.com along with a flying monkey and I was somewhat disappointed at the simplicity of the lights, but I realized they could be put to use as a WootOff alarm with some intelligence put behind them. The monkey requires no intelligence.
Basically the lights are simple USB powered devices that turn on or off with power, so here's the idea: Build a plug-in wireless device that can watch a particular twitter account (@wootoff), and when a post is submitted it activates the USB port connected to the light. It has a timeout feature that will cut off the lights when the string of posts cease.
So my questions are, what hardware do I need for this, what language(s) do I need to know to program this, particularly to interact with the twitter API, and would anybody be interested in the results?