BFF? OnStar and Twitter?

OnStar is General Motor's security and safety system which, if you've heard the radio ads, can do everything from get your doors unlocked if you lock your keys in the car to automatically letting OnStar reps know if you are in an accident, even if you are unconscious. According to information leaked in a recent online survey, you may soon find Twitter integration on your OnStar unit.

Wait, wait, isn't this precisely the sort of distraction that California was trying to outlaw with its anti-SMS while driving law? Yes, and no.


Twitter use while driving using your cell phone is definitely out. But the way this is planned would use voice-to-text conversion.

“While in your vehicle, you can use OnStar to submit and retrieve tweets (messages) via your Twitter account. Using OnStar’s Voice-Activated Hands-Free Calling system, and having your voice converted into text, you can provide updates which would appear in the 'What are you doing?' section of your Twitter homepage. It is also possible to listen to a tweet that was sent to you by someone else after it has been converted into voice. You can send and receive tweets without having to type or read anything.”

You can receive tweets as well? Well, you can see if you "follow" enough people you probably won't need the radio as entertainment.


On the other hand, and I keep saying this: do we really need more distraction in the car? Aren't we supposed to be paying attention to driving?

There's no information on when this might come to fruition, but for those of us who want to be able to drive without fearing distracted drivers weaving around the road (and we still see plenty of people using cellphones sans headsets despite the California headset law, separate from the SMS law), we hope when = never.

Yeah, yeah, we know this won't earn us any points with Twitter fans.