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KMi Seminars
Integrating Google Maps into MSG
This event took place on Wednesday 18 April 2007 at 11:30

 
Alex Little KMi, The Open University

The integration of Google maps into MSG instant messenger gives users the opportunity to find where their contacts are located geographically, their presence status and provides 'click to chat' functionality. The MSG presence maps will be going live on the OU's LabSpace (http://labspace.open.ac.uk) website at the end of April and live on the LearningSpace (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk) website shortly afterwards.

This talk gives an overview of how the MSG presence maps work technically, including the problems and issues which arose during the development process and how these were addressed.

Here are the slides which were used during the presentation.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.