Internet wide chat

[Bernie Innocenti]

Ciao,

here in Turkey they asked me how two kids or a kid and a parent
may chat to each other between two households.  Usually I get
quite the opposite question :-)

They understand there will also be privacy concerns to be addressed,
but for now they are more interested in how feasible it would be
from a technical standpoint.  Competitors have been telling that
our laptop cannot do such things and this must be disproved.

They asked me explicitly for MSN, but I explained we are using
the same protocol of Google Talk instead, and that's fine as
well.

Specifically, they want to kn

 - how could they make kids from Ankara and Istanbul chat together

 - how could a kid talk with his parents or teachers who are using
   a normal computer

 - what server infrastructure is needed locally, or if they could
   piggyback on our infrastructure.  They are thinking of a use case
   of one million kids, which is not too distant in the future.

 - for large schools of 1000 students, they ask how the mesh view UI
   would scale.  Are we switching to a search-based interface in when
   there are so many kids clustered in the same LAN?
   Note that this is not the same type of scalability of air protocols:
   for large schools they plan to break up the network using access
   points and a wired backbone.

 - classrooms in Turkey may apparently have up to 50 students.  Do we
   have any results for such an environment?

 - They asked if it is possible to configure laptops to create logical
   partitions of the network by classroom

 - They asked if video chat is possible.  I recall someone was working
   on it months ago.  What is the current status?

-- 
  \___/
  |___|  Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
   \___\ CTO OLPC Europe  - http://www.laptop.org/