I’m sitting here in a Starbucks trying out the OLPC as a blogging platform. It’s a great little machine for so many reasons, but I’m actually finding myself a little limited trying to do real stuff that I do everyday on this system. Sure it wasn’t designed for this at all so I will be fair and not judge it too harshly. The browsing experience is really well done. I just wish I had some tabs in here. maybe it’s for the best that I don’t.

Sugar is a real interesting twist on the OS, and what an OS can be. As a Give 1 Get 1 user the experience of the system for me is very different from that of the intended user. That being said, now that I’ve got the xochat.org jabber service working I can experience the community side of everything. Which change everything for the user. It’s a lot more then just chat. Being able to collaborate in real time in a AbiWord is fun. I think for student there are all sorts of fun activities that could be done with this. Then the fact that every application allows for sharing and collaboration is new way to think about applications in general.

Back to the topic of blogging with the OLPC. If I use the machine as a thin client and have all my services be web based it rocks. When I try to use the client side applications I’m running in to challenges. For example Writing in Abiword and then getting that document in to an email or blog post isn’t intuitive at all. The concept of a file structure is gone and instead is all part of the “journal.”

Since everything is written in Python, I guess I could just look at extending the applications myself. I’d like to add a publish to blog feature to AbiWord. Integrate the Chat application with Twitter. Get the camera to post directly to Flickr.

With those types of services the laptop become much more useful to me.

Then there’s this other disruptive piece of hardware that I use everyday. My iPhone. As the iPhone evolves and gets more powerful, there becomes less and less of a need for a subnotebook computer to me. As the technology gets cheaper it really feels like cell phone technology will remove the need for a low cost computing platform.

Then I guess we’re left with just a few types of machines:

• Servers – to host all this mesh and cloud computing information
• High end clients or workstations – used when you need real computing power for graphics, video, audio and software development
• light clients – mini computers, cell phones, and such to be used everyday as our communications centers
• media systems - for gaming, PVRs, home entertainment boxes that need a little more power. Would the surface fit in here?

Am I missing anything from that list?