How to use Twitter to control your remote Mac

Twitter may suffer from hack attacks and have no clear ‘monetisation’ strategy just yet, despite its huge user base, but Mac users now have an all-new thing they can do with their Twitter account – remote control of their Mac…

Ever wanted to get a quick and dirty picture of your office taken by your Mac when you’re not at home to help with pet care and security and so on? Or perhaps you’ve gone away and forgot to shut down your computer? Well, TweetMyMac (the cousin of TweetMyPC) has landed and the beta can do some of these things.

You use TweetMyMac to send commands to your Mac over the web, from a remote computer or a mobile phone.

Install the app and connect it to your Twitter account (worth setting up a special private account for this) and you can send your Mac commands via Twitter. The utility checks your tweets, and if one containing a command is detected it will put that action into effect.

There’s numerous useful commands you can send, including Shutdown and Sleep. You can also get the Mac to take a screenshot of what apps are running on it at the time, with the image then uploaded to TwitPic.

We think the iSight command’s the best one, just send the command and your Mac will take a picture of what/who is in front of it using the built-in iSight camera. That image is also uploaded to TwitPic (quite handy if someone’s made off with your Mac, potentially – perhaps Apple should extend its Find My iPhone feature to help find lost/stolen Macs also?)

The software’s in beta right now, but we felt it suitably interesting for inclusion here, given the Twitter meme that’s burning up our digital planet right now.