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.”