liveUgli
So, my last entry was about Blue Puddle, my research project for the semester. This entry is about my other project for the semester called liveUgli.
What is liveUgli? Here’s the description straight from the about page:
“liveUgli is for finding students who are doing the same thing as you, right now. Find a classmate to ask a question, or a nearby friend to study with.”
Basically, a user sits down somewhere in a study space on campus either with a laptop or at a one of the many computers, logs into liveUgli selects a building and floor, and clicks on their location on a floorplan. We’re working hard to get location detection in place so that this process is semi-automated for the user. They can also tell us which class they are studying for and what specifically they are working on.
While on the site, they can browse through the floor plans and see who is studying what where. If they tell us what classes they are taking and who their friends are, we can limit the view to just their friends and classmates.
So, once they have found someone they may be interested in studying with, asking a question of, or taking a study break with, they can either visit them in person, or instant message them via AIM, MSN, etc. or our own messaging system which has yet to be implemented.
We’ve been in close contact with Jeff Powers who is building Mates pretty much by himself now. We plan on using the services Mates provides to power liveUgli.
The other project Jeff is working closely with is Ping. Basically, it is a smartphone client for Mates.
We like to think of liveUgli as a web-client for Mates, but its much more than that.
March 13th, 2006 at 9:04 am
Kyle,
Have you guys considered making liveUgli AJAX-enabled? I hate to say it, but it really is a must for the jargon-hunters and Web 2.0 wizards. I’d be happy to pitch in a couple of hours to help with that.
I’d love to see a streamlined interface without page reload times. Let me know if you think either of these two prototype interfaces would work well:
-http://bluebus.be/bx/
-http://bluebus.be/bluebus/
I’d also add that although it might be a bit more effort, it would be pretty smooth if you used a hacked wireless router to track who was where. The router would be jacked straight into the UM backbone running OpenWRT and would report when a new client connected and authenticated through cosign. This way, the process would be entirely automated and could draw from the LDAP database on the uniqname for user information. It would be live, already populated with data, and as simple as putting up a sign indicating that you could connect to this SSID if you’d like to be listed.
=m
March 13th, 2006 at 5:35 pm
Yes, we are planning on using all the AJAX necessary to make liveUgli’s interface as streamlined as possible. Version 1.1 is due out soon which we hope will reduce the amount of page loads, user interface problems and general bugs. There’s a few new features, but nothing to rave about yet.
Those demos are pretty cool. We should probably think about using one or two AJAX libraries to implement some cool user interface stuff like you’ve demonstrated.
I think the major problem with getting a hacked router on the University network would be getting their permission. If you can do that I will be amazed. But, doesn’t that mean that you could only login when you were near the router? Or… would it connect to many of the wireless access points on campus?
We’d be happy to have you help us out… email me or the liveUgli team with some times you are available to meet.
-Kyle