August 17, 2003
Toying Around

Thanks to Rael and Joi, I found the new iChat dropin of fun, iChat Streaming Icon. Effectively very simple, it uses a plugged-in camera (like an iSight) to update the little AIM icon on a periodic basis. The regular privacy and social transparency comments apply here, of course.

What else it has exposed is how only a subset of people on my AIM contact list have actually upgraded to iChatAV. Some of them, I know, are hardware constrained to some degree. But are others constrained by Apple's plans to charge for it as unbundled from OS X 10.3?

The perils of quietly monetizing your audience are a difficult edge to walk, for sure.

A couple other interesting finds to relate....

Thanks to Trevor.Smith, I laughed aloud at this curious video. Equal parts matrix parody and Bacon Blog...

And finally, at a previous employer, we did some work with online presence (and secondary display thereof) in an IRC-oriented (but generally proprietary or closed) infrastructure. Brendyn Alexander has done some comparable work of late related to the #joiito channel, but he's extended the standard "online/offline" to incorporate recent blog-like activity. It makes for an interesting and richer experience than I normally expect from this kind of tool. Kudos to him for that, whatever his WN.

Now Playing: KEXP Live (96kbps)

Posted by esinclai at August 17, 2003 11:36 AM |