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March 10, 2006
The homework chat community
When my son Christopher comes home from school and before he starts work on his homework, he fires up his computer and the ICQ program to check who's "on". Even though he's speaking German, he refers to other people as being "on" - as opposed to "online" - which is the more usual expression (even in German). Second interesting tidbit: The program of choice is ICQ and they aren't using say AIM.
If any of his school-friends are "on" then they will quite often do their homework "together" i.e. they ask each other what the homework actually was (hmmm..) or test each other by asking questions via ICQ. In general they'll leave the chat programs running while they work in their respective homes (sounds familiar - right?).
Looking at what they are doing and I see this homework-social-network business model waiting to be discovered. The important difference being that this model obviously needs to be chat-centric as this currently forms the hub.
Posted by Matthew at March 10, 2006 02:54 PM