Basically still a Thursday post
| Friday, April 13th, 2007 | --Sean |
In one of the more amusing hacks I've seen recently, some guys from the Yahoo! Messenger team created Shumbee, a tangible Messenger status control. He's an RFID reader wrapped in a sewn cloth emoticon exterior that you can place various emotion tiles on top of to swap your online status from "Available" to "At Lunch" to "Invisible" and so on. Aside from being ridiculously cute, Shumbee is a fun example of interesting physical computer interaction and also a precursor to more useful functions like automatic cell phone updates to Messenger to indicate when you come back into range of your computer. It's also much harder to forget that you've left your "Out on an errand" status up for the past week when it's sitting on your desk staring at you, which would be my main use case for the Shumbee.