yes, my precious

the ridiculously clever folks at breakfast have invented the tweeting bike and sent it out to fight cancer, one tweet at a time.

officially launched on tuesday via the site yes i am precious, the latest inanimate object to take to the twitterverse will take its followers on a journey from coast to coast raising money for livestrong and the fight against cancer.

precious the bike will tweet its thoughts while being ridden by janeen mccrae along the transamerica trail. the journey began in yorktown, va., and mccrae and precious are now 640 miles into the trek to astoria, ore.

precious will detail its progression through the work of the tech savvy crew over at breakfast. the company have created a device that takes readings from various sensors, including temperature, humidity, grade, speed, pedal rotation, direction and GPS, and sends the results via text to the company's servers, passing through the ywitter api along the way to parse the text messages.

the system spits out a tweet automatically, but mccrae can also reach out to followers with the push of a button on her handlebars.

“most of the tweets are coming from the ‘brain’ that we built — that is, the rider has written a couple of hundred tweets that we’ve stored, each tweet has its own specific set of parameters that must be met," michael lipton, account director and partner at breakfast, explained to mashable. "for example, if she’s going down hill for 30 minutes straight in 90 degree heat, she may have set a tweet that says something like ‘coasting is easy but somehow I’m still sweaty.’ once that tweet is used, it is removed from the pool and can’t be reused, so if she hits that same criteria again a different message would be sent.”

though it's probably a lovely trip, precious isn't riding just for the pure joy of it. mccrae is trying to earn $4,262 (the number of miles on the transamerica trail) for her livestrong challenge team, team fatty. why this difficult cross-country ride? "it will be a hard journey, but much easier than the journey people affected by cancer have to take," wrote mccrae on her fundraising page.

to support the team and bask in the creative genius, follow precious here.

katie leavitt on tonic.com