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Messenger HomeHub

I'm in the process of planning my home automation and media centre setup for my new house and one of the problems I thought about on the train to work this morning was how to pervade my single MSN Messenger presence throughout my digital home.
  • Media Centre in living room
  • Media Centre in bedroom
  • Media Centre in kitchen
  • Laptop/TabletPC roaming wirelessly
Why so many media centre installations? Well I could just use media extenders but I also want internet, office and IM capability where ever I am in the house.

The problem
I have multiple locations within my house to receive IM traffic but a single IM account on peoples contact list.

The solution
Create new Messenger accounts for each location (living room, bedroom, kitchen etc) and then write an application to act as a conversation "hub" - automatically forwarding the conversation to each individual location (possibly using presence information such as the status to help decide). Messenger HomeHub is born....

As a bonus this allows me to piggy back work I've done previously with dotMSN and on other automated messenger "bot" systems. I also decided that this has a lot more potential than just directing Messenger conversations. Imagine your house has an automated Messenger system "hub" to direct requests for information; An application architecture such as the one I used in my NAntService allows for any number of extensions into other systems such as home automation, security, calendar/scheduling....kinda like a "Digital Jeeves". I particularly like the calendar/scheduling one and it's a pretty simple one to implement too by hooking into Outlook.

Messenger HomeHub Application
As I write this post I've yet to write a line of code - my goal will be for v0.1 to allow the basic conversation forwarding from one address to a set of addresses using an "auto-conference" feature. I'll be using Microsoft .NET 2005 and the dotMSN library wrapped in a Windows Service to ensure it is always logged in and ready to accept conversations. Of the top of my head I think a plugin architecture utilising an "Observer" pattern would produce a suitable application.

Updates
I'll keep you posted as to progress - I'd like to get v0.1 up and running as a proof of concept ASAP. If you are interested in this idea then drop me a line/comment and it would be cool to discuss any improvements/ideas you have.

As a final point I would like to predict big big things for digital home hubs this year but I think that there is a lot of work to do to make them fit seamlessly into peoples lives and home and the messenger location/presence problem above is a good example. I also think that Tablet PC's or rather portable touch screen displays (MS Smart displays?!) will be big...Rather then get a laptop to roam round the house I'm going to get a Tablet PC to allow me to write notes and draw pictures, this is a much more natural way to communicate I think.

Comments

Unknown said…
Hey Owen - thanks for the feedback and I think the "agent" idea is great. I was going to simply spam out the conversation to the internal messenger accounts from the hub account, the danger is flooding an unattended PC with hundreds of dead conversation windows...maybe a cleanup service to close these windows....oi, its getting complicated!

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