Lunch with my friend Ed today, another of many discussions over the years about the aiosphere. He is of the opinion that the whole thing is simple. I am of the opinion that the whole thing is hard. I guess it might be because we have different ideas about what “the whole thing” is. He favors mocking up a pair of hardware objects, and throwing together some scripts and PHP code to make small amounts of data flow between them.

Thing is, I know that people have been doing this exact thing for over a decade now, and reinventing the wheel each time.  I believe that what is missing is a universal architecture; hardware, firmware, software and script; which supports both the rapid creation of new hardware, and the easy creation of new linkages and behaviors for existing hardware. A universal ambient gadget system. This is the aiosphere.

But the distance between our perspectives simply serves to highlight the fundamental problem with my concept: I cannot easily articulate it, describe it, define it, its scope, its shape, its size. This, I think, will be my biggest challenge. I keep telling Ed, making objects is easy; coding point to point communications is easy. Making a demo from those ingredients is easy, and people do it every day.  But creating a new protocol, that overlays the global information network, and provides dead-simple connections between objects in different places, that is the grail (and I will be happy if it turns out to be easy too, but I’m not counting on it).