Ambient technology is definitely not about mood lighting, instead it is something far more interesting. It is a term which describes an idea that technology will adapt itself to your presence, performing the necessary reconfigurations and integration to meet your needs or simply increase your comfort. Typically it will do this without much of a need for human interaction, instead it just quietly gets on with its job. Such technology can be used for a variety of purposes, one of them being to deliver information to the user in situations where it is appropriate to take in a chunk of information at a glance, think of quickly glancing at a photo rather than looking at a spreadsheet. You could stare at a photo for quite a long time, but you can take in most of the information it has to offer quite quickly, the same is generally not true for a spreadsheet. An ambient information system such as this can be used to get a sense of what a community is up to, a perfect candidate being a community of Twitter users. A system which does just that is Twitterspaces which is now available as a view of OU users on Twitter at: http://eniac.hopto.org/soiaware/twitter_display/planetou.php.