In January of 2005, Nicholas Negroponte announced his idea to create an inexpensive laptop for children. Originally billed as the “$100 Laptop”, the device would provide a tool for poor and underserved children to tap into the educational opportunities presented by technology. His vision has since grown into a nonprofit organization, One Laptop per Child, sponsored by companies such as AMD, Google, and Red Hat. Now called the XO-1 and priced at about $188 USD, the first mass-produced laptops started rolling off the assembly line in November 2007.

In line with OLPC’s stated goal of providing a child-friendly laptop, the user interface is strikingly minimalistic. For example, only one “Activity” (roughly corresponding to an application) can be viewed at a time, and the typical hierarchical file system is hidden by an abstract “Journal” that records both files manipulated and Activities used.

However, the most interesting aspect of the interface is the way it integrates the network. When the laptop is powered on, the user is presented with a screen that shows icons representing the local computer and which Activities are being used. “Zooming out” once via a button on the keyboard shows the user’s friends who are currently connected through the built-in wireless network; zooming out twice shows everybody currently connected, including friends, with users who are all participating in the same Activity clustered together. Mousing over each neighbor’s icon shows what he is currently doing, and small Activity icons next to the neighbor icons allow the user to join the Activity with a single click. Since the intent of the laptop is to encourage collaboration and sharing, almost every Activity on the computer is sharable over the network.

For example, you might want to share a program you created with one of the bundled programming languages. Pressing a Share button on the keyboard makes the program visible next to your icon on your friends’ laptops. They can then click on the icon to download and use or edit the program themselves. Conversely, your friend might ask you for help with a document he’s writing, and you can simply click on his icon to view the document and offer your advice.

The social networking ramifications of this are significant. The computer’s default interface is essentially a visualization of the network the user belongs to. Although the interface does not make visible the edges between friends, it does highlight those people explicitly marked friends, and it shows which Activities they are using and with whom. Furthermore, all the people shown in the network are geographically close, so one can easily imagine that friendships on the network will reflect or lead to friendships in reality.

The result is a social networking tool that goes beyond anything the current generation offers. There is no layer between the computer’s interface and the tool—the interface is the tool. Social networking is built into and emphasized by the computer’s default interface. Video games and instant messaging services have long provided a means for groups of people to congregate on-line, communicating and interacting in real time, but they have always been limited in their scope of utility. More recently, websites such as Facebook and Google have taken strides in connecting computer users, allowing them to talk in real time, share documents and pictures, view and edit schedules, and so on. But these all suffer two significant flaws. First, the user must actively seek out the service. Facebook may be ubiquitous among college students and gaining ground elsewhere, but the vast majority of Internet users do not use it. Secondly, these services are not integrated smoothly with the rest of the computer’s interface. For example, to share photos on Facebook, you must navigate to your Photos page, find the Add Photos button, select your photos, annotate them, organize them, and then hope your friends will log on to Facebook and see them (granted, not an unlikely event). Although it doesn’t have all of the features of these services, the XO’s interface does what the others cannot in providing universal and simple connectivity.

See also:

Laptop With a Mission Widens Its Audience (NYT Blog post)

YouTube slideshow of XO’s user interface