As you may have gathered by now, I'm incapable of building anything webby that doesn't involve printing it out, colouring it in and posting it to people. I know enough html to do links. That's it. But I'm also fascinated by this stuff and want to explore it by using it rather than just thinking about it, because thinking isn't a strong point either. So as soon as a consumerised version of a technology becomes available I tend to dive in. (Which normally means grappling with stuff that doesn't work very well.)
Anyway. RFID and proto-spiminess have been on my mind for a while. So I got myself the tikitag kit and the mir:ror one. And tried to think of something to do with them. Mucked about for a bit. Got bored. Stopped. Then, the other day, was reminded of something and tried again. And so I've made this:
It's a mortar (or maybe it's a pestle) with a hole drilled in the back and the mirror thing stuck in it. On top of it is a bouncy ball that's been cut in half and glued back together with a tikitag RFID thing in the middle. All in rather an ungainly manner. These are now connected to my computer at the office.
When you stick the ball on the mirror reader it fires up and posts the word 'work' to a twitter account called 'russellisat'. When you remove it, it posts 'large'. The tikitag reader is connected to my machine at home. Sticking the ball on there posts the word 'home'. (It doesn't seem capable of doing anything when you remove a tag, though I might have missed it.)
And that's it - it's a place-announcing machine with three states: russell is at home, russell is at work, russell is at large.
OBVIOUSLY there are much easier ways to accomplish this, if that was my goal. I know this is a lame and trivial use of technology. I'm sure other people have done this better, slicker, whateverer. There's probably even a literature of it. But I was trying to find out for myself what it's like live with this sort of thing, and this is what I can do.
It's early days but here are thoughts so far:
1. I much prefer the mirr:or reader to the tikitag one because it gives you some visual and audio freeback that something has happened. And it occasionally actually works. Whereas the tikitag one doesn't much. You wouldn't want to rely on this stuff for anything mission critical. Like twittering your breakfast.
2. The object you chose to represent your presence seems quite important. For efficiencies sake I could have just used my Oyster card, or stuck the tag on my keys but I think that would have made it too important and reduced the ritual and playfulness of it. I want to be able to forget the rubber ball (partly for plausible deniability if I want to pretend to be somewhere I'm not, and partly because the possibility of forgetting demands paying attention to the act, which seems important.) I've been thinking about the stuff I carry in my pockets a bit. I suspect this kind of stuff'll be the among the first things to get smart/spimey. I like the idea of conkers, marbles and pocket watches with data and connectivity inside. They seem like appropriately personal things to represent you.
3. Home/Work/Third Place seems like enough locative granularity for something this public. They're not just geographical locations (and they do move around) they also say something about the kind of stuff I'm likely to be doing and the kind of interruptions I'm likely to be interested in. It's the kind of information that might help someone wondering if you're around, or fancy a cup of tea, without constantly bothering them with your locatostream (I made up a word).
4. Twitter's not quite the right vehicle for declaring this information. It's not interesting enough to subscribe to. Ideally I'd like it to trigger a webpage or widget that looked like one of those On-Air lights you get in radio studios and it'd just say home/work/elsewhere but I don't know how to do that.
5. I do slightly worry that even this level of location-announcing represents over-sharing and bad security but at the moment the novelty outweighs that. If people start following that twitter account I'll probably get scared and close it. (Especially they're called Fingers McRobber or something.)
6. All the software and apps and everything is really creaky right now. Horrible to use. But this seems like a platform to me, like the iPhone or Twitter, a platform where people could build neat little things.
Er. That's it. I'll let you know how I get on.