Twitter for cars: Ford tech reads your incoming tweets aloud

Now you'll be able hear your "tweets" on the street.

Ford Motor CEO Alan Mulally will announce Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that the automaker is incorporating a Twitter application into its next-generation Sync in-car communication system. It is one of three free apps — the others are online entertainment services Pandora and Stitcher — in the first wave of what Ford hopes will become a portfolio of mobile-phone-like apps available for tech-minded motorists.

"It's about bringing the Internet to the car," said Charles Golvin, principal analyst at Forrester Research. "What they're doing is making it really easy."

Sync, co-created with Microsoft, is a system that lets drivers operate their Bluetooth-enabled smartphones and music players with voice commands and have text messages read to them, among other functions. Since Sync was unveiled three years ago, Ford has sold more than 1 million vehicles with it.

Encouraging outside developers to create apps — useful and fun applications sold or offered free — for the system seemed a logical next step. The goal is to get in on the apps revolution that has helped make mobile devices such as Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch so popular.

"It's not a trend. It's a tsunami," says Doug VanDagens, connected services director for Ford. "We have to get into that game."

Ford's first plays:

•OpenBeak. Bringing in Twitter, which lets users send short messages to the masses, seemed a natural. OpenBeak, formerly called TwitterBerry, is an app that makes it easy to use Twitter's most popular functions from mobile devices.

•Pandora. This Internet radio service boasts 40 million users worldwide. It lets users custom-tailor music in song lists that can be paused or skipped through.

•Stitcher. A personalized, on-demand radio system. Users can pick radio programs they want to hear, and listen on their own schedules.

Drivers won't be able to compose tweets (though that may come), but the system reads them as they stream in. Even at that, some tech watchers question its value.

Listening to tweets can be distracting to drivers, says Phil Leigh of Inside Digital Media.

He says the more potent applications are likely to be Pandora and Stitcher. "If you have Pandora, you don't need satellite radio," Leigh says.

Pandora's founder is thrilled. Listeners in cars "is kind of the Holy Grail for us," Tim Westergren says. "Half of all radio listening happens in the car."

Adds Stitcher co-founder Noah Shanok: "This is huge for us."

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