UPDATE: Chris Blizzard has added a fresh posting about where things are going with presence (so I’ll reiterate: this concept of instantiating social presence at such a fundamental low level in the $100 laptop design is very important, and very exciting) — since comments/pings on that earlier Sugar article mentioned below are closed, I thought I’d better update this and ping him again!
Following my earlier rant about grandma-friendly computers, I thought I’d better nose around a bit to catch up with the $100 Laptop / One Laptop Per Child / OLPC project. The OLPC Wiki took me quickly to some interesting notes by Chris Blizzard, who reflects on the role being played by baking IM/presence and sharing directly into the OLPC software environment (known as Sugar):
We want to make sure that we have a more rich experience than just text can deliver. So we’ve been experimenting a bit with allowing drawing in chat. As time goes on we’ll start to add other interesting types to the chat. We hope that it will be possible to share music that kids have created as well as images that they find. This isn’t as far fetched as it sounds – there’s already a music activity in the works.
Second, the concept of presence. Sadly, Tom (see earlier demo/screenshot — ed.) is alone in the world so other people on the network don’t show up. So he’s missing the most important aspect of the interface. We want this interface to be social. This means that kids can communicate in every app, that they can show each other things, that they can take each other on tours of the web and many other ways of collaborating.
For example the [Share] Button that he mentions doesn’t just share a link with another person. When that person opens the link he or she can optionally follow you as you travel from web site to web site.
Fabulous! Building in low-level presence/IM support is not only a guaranteed winner for the child-learner target audience, it also changes fundamentally the way developers will think about software for the $100 Laptop. The kind of scenarios being envisaged were of course foreshadowed some 35 years ago in the early sketches and cardboard mock-ups created by Alan Kay for his Dynabook — Alan had kids designing space ships, experimenting with alternative gravity fields, and racing around in multiplayer games. (Alan is part of the OLPC team, so this should be no surprise).
I’m excited by the convergence of what Blizzard has written above with the way we’re aiming to bake presence and social software support into the lowest levels of the software for the Open Content Initiative – at least the experimental parts of it that we’re informally calling the ‘playspace’. OCI is conceived as supporting learning by grown-ups, but (a) it will be used by a much wider audience, and (b) a lot of the usability and sociability issues are the same as those faced by OLPC.
Our first crack at this has been to begin re-engineering our Jabber-based geolocation-aware IM tool, BuddySpace , by disaggregating the key elements of it into a super-lightweight AJAX client that we now call MSG. Our first usage-in-anger of MSG takes place next week at the European Semantic Web Conference, as reported here. Should be fun!
Technorati Tags: olpc, chat, im, presence, msg, buddyspace, oci, open.content, sugar
