These are all great applications for the aiosphere system:

A Make magazine blog entry shows a nice gizmo that turns on an LED backlight behind a series of little pictures of friends, so the user can see at a glance who’s online. Used VB or similar.

Another Make post, this one about an ambient orb made from an ikea lamp. Notable for use of an Ethernet connection.

Another Arduino ambient orb, this one USB.

Here is video of a news feed scroller which uses a WizNet ethernet chip. Here is a PDF abstract of the project.

Here is a Stock Clock project which uses Zigbee modules, useful for looking at the overall structure of the type of system I am describing.

For conceptual blockbusting, inspiration, and to get your stalled creative juices flowing, I recommend the following:

• Design News’ Gadget Freak series
• Instructables
• Make Magazine
• Sparkfun
• Circuit Cellar

Gadget Freak this week featured a tiny simple PIC system which calls your cell phone when something happens in your house.  It uses dirt-simple pulse dialing (by toggling the phone line with a relay).  Of course, in the aiosphere we’d do it the hard way, by messaging a server and having a widget SMS you.  Still, very clever and very inspiring!

Many simple output devices, LED and text, could make interesting clocks. I like the idea of a little text display which is made into a clock by the network driver. As well as the LED ideas I have talked about before.  I also like the idea, strange or not, of a generic system which is turned into a clock by software somewhere on the network.  Check out PC Mag’s collection of geeky clocks.

Mood Tap is a fantastic idea, and a very excellent FireFox addon. Unfortunately, the project, and especially the addon, seems to be long dead. Still, the extension taps into the site to render the mood of the world in the corner of your browser, and let you communicate your own mood back into the system. Nice!

Of course, best would be to see this on a little RGB-illuminated toy globe on your bookshelf.