December 18, 2002
"The claim is it's a system where you have a network; you have a way to monitor who's on the network; and if you want to talk to them you hook them up," said Gregory Aharonian, publisher of Internet Patent News Service, a newsletter that's critical of technology patents. "If you're doing something like that, you're potentially infringing."But as Phil Windley astutely noted a few days ago, presence is nothing new:
I started to ask myself why I wanted to log into 10 different computers back then and it really came down to one thing: presence. The main reason we'd all log into every workstation in the group was so that we could tell who else was there and communicate with them using "write." We have a VAX8600 and there'd be lots of other students logged in...I remember doing similar things... in fact, my favourite presence system, and by some margin the most powerful I know, is still the MOO commandline. Here's a snippet of "help #35500":
Examples:
@@who (pals) for loc - Show all connected `pals', sorted by location.
@@who (liv!) (sick) - Show all players in The Living Room (#17), and those online in the same room as Sick.
@@who (class-SSPC+) - Show all connected descendants of SSPC (#49900).
(I stumbled across this page as I was playing with Daypop and doing a search on RSS and MOO. Hmm, maybe I will RSS enable mailing lists on my MOO. Do I know you on Lambda?)
Anyway, as I understand the patent, key aspects include having everything in a single application, and being notified when a person comes online. It seems as if @pals isn't sufficient to show prior art, but the combination of @pals and @inter might be.
Do we expect Lambda to show up in a prior art challenge to the AOL patent?
Hi aldon, - good to see you here. (I don't think we've met on-MOO, but I don't hang out there much these days. Anyway, fwiw, I'm #112104).
@pals, @inter, @watch, @@who - all really good parts of the MOO presence system. What I like best is it's all so extensible, whether with player classes, feature objects, or other active things.
As for a patent challenge, well, I'm not holding my breath. There seems to be plenty of prior art around the net, but I really don't see it moving unless AOL try to enforce the patent against someone with deep pockets...
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