http://rooreynolds.com/2008/03/12/ambient-skype/
made me think of our discussion about the different uses of the (sometime broken) computers, and the meaning of “electronic presence”.
A previous email from Jérôme:
- when there was those bombing in London in July 05, the Cellphone Network Carriers were quickly crushed: too many people were inquiring about the safety of their relatives. A simple alternative i read about at that time (i forgot where and from whom) was to have mobile phone with an IP system that would then reply to a simple ping
- Yesterday, Pierre’s computer crashed – all the data are safe, he does backup everything vital all the time. Despite this fact, I was worried by the loss of its hardware: he couldn’t make sure Martine who stayed in France was alright and couldn’t let her know he was since he was not connected to the AIM network; not that he needed to talk to her – there always is the phone – but he couldn’t see her in the corner of his screen.
That’s typically an exemple of what I’m referring to when I am speaking about Electronic Presence, a networked extension of the self.
- Then we started our rants and 2 pences about a personnal IP which would allow others to _ping_ someone – which means they can know you’re safe/alive. one could setup an auto reply status to the ping, like: “Hospital”, “I’m fine”, “sleeping”, “meeting”. Auto status could enabled in advance using calendar applications
- It really does sounds like FaceBook status; there is some Twitter too, under the hood.
- OpenID could be a nice receptacle for this kind of development.
To wich I replied:
Makes me think as well of an interesting interface that there is in the operating system plan 9 (a new more “perfect” unix that never really took off by some of the makers of unix), it is a sort of “distributed” os and there is a part of the UI that shows who’s connected to a machine with small icons like this (on the top left corner):
it is very similar to ichat buddies icons, but I like how it is built deep in to the system and UI, and linked to the idea that our personal machines could be seen as mere entry points in a more global distributed space, where our friends and loved ones are allowed to enter a common space.
and Jérôme quoted:
“Plan 9 is based on UNIX but was developed to demonstrate the concept of making communication the central function of the computing system.”
Funny you posted this tonight; a bit earlier this evening, i was connecting to my mac mini at home via VNC and, (endorsing my DJ costume:) I played music for Amandine. She was really surpised to hear the first notes of songs we both like. Excited, she called me via Skype to let me listen what i was playing, and sing along for me with my iTunes playlist. I was like a ghost in the loft, a remote presence, or more exactly like an Electronic Presence – i do like this term and use it all the time to explain what kind of work we are doing; playing with the application on the mac mini, making noise, printing documents and launching tasks – all this from the wifi connexion I have in my bed in hospital.
Comment by jerome — March 18, 2008 @ 5:03 pm
These two articles describes ideas, project and products we were speaking about for quite some time.
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/02/botanicalls-twitter-diy.html
http://www.winextra.com/2008/02/25/crowdsourcing-your-home-security/
Comment by jerome — March 28, 2008 @ 2:41 am
[...] (Via Reed’s shared items in Google Reader, via Capacity.) [...]
Pingback by r-echos » Blog Archive » Botanicalls Twitter DIY — April 2, 2008 @ 8:16 am
[...] where someone can ping you and see your status: online, offline, busy, … alive. (see also: Ambient post on [...]
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