If the putrescent gut rot that is social media website Twitter.com hasn't already taken over your brain, now it can also take over your house. With a help of a few apps and a misunderstanding of burglary, changes in lighting, temperature, and guest arrivals can be announced and monitored through social media.

The New York Times reports that one of the first to adapt this Big Brother-style house watch is San Francisco man Tom Coates, whose riveting automated updates can be seen at @HouseofCoates. By syncing various "gizmos" and apps in his space to Twitter, every shifting detail in his abode is shared online.

Coates, who recounted his story of homesteading in the digital realm with an international audience much larger than his 1,000 followers, enjoys this overexposure. No kidding.

When friends who are staying with Mr. Coates return home unexpectedly, he receives a tweet from the house: "@tomcoates, is that you?" Mr. Coates then logs into an app on his smartphone that shows him a live video feed of the apartment. When he sees houseguests, he tells them, through the device's speaker, to help themselves to anything in the fridge.

Dominance over one's dominion is the latest frontier in convincing social media to one day be the boss of us, and it doesn't just stop at giving an inanimate structure with four walls and no heartbeat the ability to tweet (?) at its followers (?). Coates recently admonished his house (???) for reporting how much he weighed.

"I have stopped doing that recently because I've put on a ton of weight," he said.

What happens when @HouseofCoates starts having an affair with Coates' partner? Will the house get subtweeted? Or—worse—blocked? By then, it'll probably be too late.

"This may seem really weird," he said, "but I feel like it's deepened my emotional relationship with my house."

Let's hope this guy has a panic room.

Not to be outdone by the man who lets his house tweet, Thomas Murray of Philadelphia programmed an app called Twine to monitor the temperature of his apartment, thereby proving to his landlord that no, really, the temperature is really hot and can we please have a better apartment now? Murray described the space as "an inferno."

Eventually, the landlord gave up, and moved the couple into the apartment down the hall, which was almost twice as big as their old place, didn't cost any more, and had a working air-conditioner to boot.

Apps! Solving our problems and divulging the details of our private lives to the world so that one day we won't have to.

[Image via AP]