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sobriqueOK, so what if there was a portable 'thing' that incorporates the basics of a wireless router, and a lightweight webserver?
A portable module, that allowed someone to ... more or less carry their 'profile' with them, but also act as a more flexible peer to peer communication relay - and ideally each of these ... well, thingies should be able to latch onto a 'real' netlink, to serve as a gateway.
You'd end up with something not entirely dissimilar to the early internet, albeit with somewhat less static routes across it, and allow you to ... well, share much of the same things as people are sharing via stuff like twitter and blogs and stuff, but in a proximity oriented domain. Maybe you share some artwork with everyone in the room, or some kind of informational content - perhaps you do this with GPS co-ordinates and a static 'emplacement' that's tagged with a full entry about that picture on the wall.
Oh, and you'd get more flexibility in net access, as you'd be building a daisy-chain of sorts to the nearest public hotspot. Ideally though, you'd have to incorporate something a little more ... tolerant of outage. But hey, once upon at time, stuff like email was a store and forward protocol - mail servers would relay to each other as and when they could, because 'being online' required a modem and a phone line.
Is this awesome?
A portable module, that allowed someone to ... more or less carry their 'profile' with them, but also act as a more flexible peer to peer communication relay - and ideally each of these ... well, thingies should be able to latch onto a 'real' netlink, to serve as a gateway.
You'd end up with something not entirely dissimilar to the early internet, albeit with somewhat less static routes across it, and allow you to ... well, share much of the same things as people are sharing via stuff like twitter and blogs and stuff, but in a proximity oriented domain. Maybe you share some artwork with everyone in the room, or some kind of informational content - perhaps you do this with GPS co-ordinates and a static 'emplacement' that's tagged with a full entry about that picture on the wall.
Oh, and you'd get more flexibility in net access, as you'd be building a daisy-chain of sorts to the nearest public hotspot. Ideally though, you'd have to incorporate something a little more ... tolerant of outage. But hey, once upon at time, stuff like email was a store and forward protocol - mail servers would relay to each other as and when they could, because 'being online' required a modem and a phone line.
Is this awesome?
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Re: because we have the technology
Date: 2009-02-25 07:19 pm (UTC)Not exactly what I wanted, but the Gadget Show site is a bit pants. Last year he did much the same as the above link, but using a laptop.
That said, popsci does have some interesting Wifi articles:
http://www.popsci.com/category/tags/wi-fi-0
Re: because we have the technology
Date: 2009-02-25 07:21 pm (UTC)Re: because we have the technology
Date: 2009-02-25 10:41 pm (UTC)The latest issue of wired has an article about location aware apps. Whoishere is physically local profile browsing, while twinkle let's you subscribe to a localised twitter stream. There are also AR style apps that overlay the view through the camera with wiki-style content left by others.
Fancy forming a start up? I'm sure there's a lot of skills on your friends list...
Re: because we have the technology
Date: 2009-02-25 11:19 pm (UTC)In many ways I like the idea of starting a company, but things like this... well, they do often tend to 'crash and burn' - if you don't get the uptake, or the right pricepoint, they just don't catch on - and you need to attract the large stampeding herd, as with any sort of 'social network'.
Might be easier to build as a phone module of some kind, but it really does need to be as idiot proof as possible - the reason facebook is way bigger than LJ is mostly because you don't have to have the faintest clue what you're doing ot use it :)
Re: because we have the technology
Date: 2009-02-26 07:58 am (UTC)If only you knew a lot of people that spent too much time on line, that would see hacking the herd as fun...
Iphone (bigger market) or android (open os) apps may well be the way to go for this. It could even be a variant of the twitter engine (which is open source).