While prototyping, a need emerged for a web service that could provide URLs for the availability (“status”) of a person, as well as the sets of friends’ status each person is tracking on their device. We’ve put together a scrappy-but-functional RESTful service that today graduated into its own repo: https://github.com/mozilla/project_haiku_status_api.iot/
This will form the backend for a series of experiments and studies we’ll be doing as we explore and refine the product concept.
We’re taking it a step at a time, and - as all the requirements change almost daily - trying not to get ahead of ourselves with the implementation. But fundamentally I think this is a powerful concept. The device (which we currently envisage as a band or bracelet, with LEDs lit up and animating as statuses change) becomes a web client, consuming this service. (The smartphone app actually does the requests and communicates the responses via bluetooth, but this is a detail.) It makes something intangible and abstract very real and tangible.