Tim O’Reilly’s post on Chumby piqued my interest in the cute little device, but, even after reading the vendor’s page, I still wasn’t sure what the gizmo does. My next step, of course, was to consult Wikipedia, hoping that someone from Chumby or a FOO camp attendee created an article explaining what it does and how it works. (“Web-enabled wifi clock radio” doesn’t do much for me: I mean, will it be Web 2.0 compliant?) At the time, there was a Wikipedia article about Chumby, but the article was already nominated for deletion. It seems a little over-zealous to nominate an article for deletion when the product was introduced over the weekend.
Of course, I added a vote to keep the Chumby article, but its future on Wikipedia doesn’t seem bright. The discussion on the Articles for Deletion page are pretty revealing of what Wikipedia users regard as legitimate sources for articles. Apparently personal blogs – even Tim O’Reilly’s – don’t qualify as legitmate sources, and neither do manufacturers’ sites. The Chumby skeptics are waiting for stories about the gizmo to filter out to the mainstream or, at least, computer trade press before they’ll vote to keep the article.
Althought I’m still not sure what Chumby does, it does seems like it could be a useful device. (Hopefully a FOO Camp attendee will bring his to the next Austin Bloggers Stammtisch.) I don’t use Tiger’s Dashboard much, but offloading some of the widgets like weather, Flickr feeds, and terror alert levels to a little device that plays mp3s could be nice. However, how many devices to I want to carry around? I don’t use a smartphone, but integrating these features to a phone would probably make more sense than embedding them in a cute fuzzy package.
The real opportunity of Chumby, as O’Reilly points out, is hackability. Telcos, including the wireless carriers are notorious for wanting retain control over everything on their network. (My students are always surprised when I tell them that before the 1984 consent decree Americans were forbidden from owning their own telephones.) I doubt we’ll ever see a mobile handset as hackable as the Chumby, and technologies like J2ME which could enable end-user software development seems to be dead in the water. Chumby may never take off, but it seems like a great step in the direction of hackable personal gadgets.
Update: Here’s some inside info on the Chumby from one of it’s developers. Also, after I posted this, I made a perhaps idiosyncratic connection between Chumby and an earlier cute information appliance, 3com’s ill-fated Audrey.
