Volition

As seen on Planet Jabber, The Jabber Google Map is a moderately useless, but nonetheless cool intersection of two geeky technologies: Jabber instant messaging and Google Maps.

Make with the clicky and you can see not only where I am and if I am online, but (assuming I have my status updated accurately) what I am doing.

The Map displays the location of everyone registered who is online (and optionally, offline), using the familiar Google Maps interface. I am not too sure what this is good for, apart from demonstrating the inherent coolness of Jabber and Google Maps, but I am sure it could be useful if organisations or communities could deploy their own instance of it. Want to find out if anyone is online to field a tech support question in the bay area? Just go to your company's Map and find out, for example.

You register with the map by getting it to add you to its buddy list (it gets added to yours, too) and specifying a location for each Jabber resource you use. Thus, if you log in using a different computer at home and at work, the map can reflect this. Instead of sending you an email when you register, it sends you a Jabber message and to confirm you reply to that message - it is kind of odd having a conversation with a computer like that, but hey, this is where we are headed.

Interestingly, you do not create an account, per se, on the map's website; it is handled using the Jabber subscription mechanism. In this way, Jabber is acting as a (weak) identity system. I wonder if this would be useful in general. Maybe you could send a message to a website to allow you to sign in. If you go offline you also get logged out of the website.

More intereresting things to think about.