How to Grow a plant with social media

When I first hit the "like" button on the Meet Eater Facebook fan page, It seemed like any other fan page, nothing really happened. However behind the scene I had unintentionally watered a small plant in Australia. This plant know as Meet Eater is the brainchild of Bashkim Isai who is a design student at the University of Queensland, Australia.

Every time this already famous plant makes a friend an electronic system delivers water and nutrients to the soil around him. So he stops making friends he dies. People could really take a note from this.

So what really sets this aside from anything else that people are doing with social media right now? There are lots of real world interactions with social media. Well the difference is that users are now responsible for the health of a living organism via their social networks.

Isai writes on the plant's Facebook page "Behind this project is the idea that by introducing both physical and virtual levels of interaction the plant is able to make the move from being an object to being a creature."

Well what happens if a fan page like Coca Cola post this on their wall and all its 11 million fans start to like this little plant, it will end up in a pool. However Meet Eater has  bandwidth protection, which shuts off the watering if too many people start loving him.

Isai says he wants to help re-establish the connection between human beings and plants. I think there are some better approaches to this than creating a fan page and making people post on the wall to keep the plant alive, however it seems to be working as Meet Eater has been alive for 88 days now and has almost 7000 friends.

I think that FarmVille should invest in this program to let its users grow real farms with real produce and animals. On the other hand I can see a lot of plants and animals dying when I go on vacation and don't take care of them........