I recently saw this video from Kevin Rose about how Twitter could be used for monitoring of home alarm systems, and it was further supported by industry analyst John Honovich, who said that except for a few reservations Kevin's idea "has merit."

Here's a little background on Kevin: He has worked a bit as a technology journalist/pundit, but mainly he's a web entrepreneur, and is the driving force behind Digg.com -- a news site that chooses what goes on the hompeage by social networking "Diggs" that push a story to the top. It's like Yahoo's Buzz (which copied the Digg concept) if you're more familiar with that site. Kevin generally is a pretty free-thinking kind of guy -- he looks for place where technology can serve us and "how we can use technology and free solutions to disrupt some of these businesses" -- by businesses he means your big alarm monitoring companies of the which you see advertising regularly on national TV.

Let me run through the concept which Kevin proposes in the video:

1. Homeowner installs intrusion sensors and cameras that can be connected to via Web
2. Sensors and cameras go to some sort of hardware like a panel.
3. Instead of that panel/hardware dialing a monitoring company when it goes into alarm mode, it sends out a Twitter notification.
4. Twitter notification is received by family, friends, neighbors, who then login to check actual video.
5. Friends/neighbors then call the police if needed.

"Let me know, it's early, I haven't had any caffeine yet, so this could be another one of my half-baked ideas," says Rose at the end of the video. I think it is one of those half-baked ideas.

As John Honovich points out, it is technically feasible to do. He points to motion detection cameras as the obvious technology, but I'd also suggest that we look at today's array of combined devices that feature both a PIR sensor and a video camera. While some folks in Honovich's blog questioned the use of low-end, motion detection cameras for such a system since they would generate lots of false alerts, let's put a little trust in technology and assume for a minute that there are cameras and camera-sensors out there which could work and not generate too many false alarms.