Fancy an ice tea? Just tweet the vending machine

This is cool. Soft drinks company BOS is letting Twitter users get their hands on a can of its iced tea just by tweeting a vending machine.

Here’s how it works: the BOS ice tea robot, called BEV, connects to the Twitter Streaming API and registers the configured hashtag as a filter. All tweets containing the hashtag on the entire Twitter network are then streamed to the BOS sampling machine. It then checks every Tweet’s location settings, and compares it with its own location boundaries (also configurable).

When a Tweet is found to be within the boundaries, a drink is dispensed, and the machine deactivates itself for set period. During this time, the screen name field of the tweet is displayed on the LED display, alternated every five seconds by the number of seconds left before the machine becomes active again.

Originally triggered using tokens and rigged with speakers and cameras to show her inner workings, BEV has recently been tweaked to respond to tweets.

BEV is currently in Cape Town, South Africa but you can follow her travels on Facebook and Twitter and score yourself a free can of BOS Ice Tea.

The company claims that the Twitter-loving vending machine is a world first.