David Barrett:, iGlance @ CodeCon 2006, 3:15pm Saturday

Continuing prejudicial CodeCon session previews:

David Barrett: iGlance, 3:15pm Saturday @ Codecon 2006

Basically iGlance tries to recreate the advantages of "being there", but remotely, over the internet. In essence I asked "What's so great about being physically present? Well, I can see you, I can talk to you, I can see your computer, I can use your computer... Heck, I can do all that online!" With iGlance, you can continue using the same "social tools" you've refined for when physically present, but from any internet connection. Peeking over a cubical wall is replaced with glancing at your buddy list. Yelling across the room is push-to-talk. Screen sharing is asking you to sit at my keyboard. Everything is oriented around this central metaphor.

More deja vu for me. This yearning to recreate the benefits of physical co-presence online, by reusing the familiar metaphors of co-presence, was also what animated my Austin-based Internet startup Activerse (Web 1.0 era, 1996-1999).

It appears iGlance is an evolution of classic net collaboration tools, integrated, updated to assume VOIP (via push-to-talk) and webcams, and open-sourced. It's not clear how colleagues' current IP addresses are found -- is there a dependency on a lookup service @ quinthar.com? To the extent it includes nice features and unifying philosophy, I would expect its winning techniques to be eventually adopted by the big IM networks and sotware packages.

Technorati Tags: codecon, codecon2006, iGlance, activerse, presence

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