MattW‘s just gone public with a project he’s working on called “Glancing”. From his project notes:

“The analogy I’m thinking of here is a group of people sitting working at their computers. Every so often, you look up and look around you, sometimes to rest your eyes, and other times to check people are still there. Sometimes you catch an eye, sometimes not. Sometimes it triggers a conversation. But it bonds you into a group experience, without speaking.

Would it be possible to build software like this? That’s what Glancing is intended to do (there are more implicit assumptions in this): To model a group of people online who occassionally glance at each other, which is a small social transaction. This is done using a group model which stores the glance state: High if people have been glancing recently, low otherwise.”

It’s an interesting way to look at what some social software could be. Not a system that encompasses of facilitates all interactions of a group, but something that builds the necessary starting conditions for those interactions. The fertile substrate or “loam” as we matt(s) are fond of calling it.

MMORPGs seem to be advancing this ‘ecological’ model of social interactions through quite different, connected apps/systems: The GameNeverEnding particularly. Something like Glancing would fit right in with persistent worlds – maintaining loose, low-effort connections to the people in those other places while you are working on your desktop…

Anyway – take a look at MattW’s Glancing Notes at see what you think:

» Interconnected: Glancing Notes