I have a confession to make. I was given a challenge to implement a social technology and I totally failed. Now that I have that off my chest, I'll back up and tell you the story.

My wife's 91 year-old grandmother lives in Mill Valley, California, a few freeway exits north of the Golden Gate bridge. She sends us beautifully handwritten letters, often folded around newspaper articles about HP that she clips from the Marin Independent Journal. This is, of course, the old-school version of human filtering and forwarding that we discussed in my last post. Sadly, we don't often respond with paper and pen, but we try to make the drive over the river (GG bridge) and through the woods (GG park) to her quaint apartment every couple of months.

On a recent visit with Grams - that's what we call her - I realized that she was missing out on a lot of communication among the family members. The most techno-phobic in the family had recently discovered the wonderment of email and were urgently propagating urban folklore to the rest of us. Grams was the last hold out. We had to repeat all of the conversations that had transpired and print the photos from the web sites and bring them along. Something had to done and I was just the person to do it.

"Grams, how would you feel about me teaching you to use email?"
"Well, how much would it cost? I can pay a little bit."
"Nothing. I'll give you a computer and the email service is free.", I explained, knowing that her retirement complex has freely available WiFi. "I'll drive back up in a couple weeks and show you how to use it."
"Ok. As long as you don't mind teaching me. I don't know much about computers."
"No problem."

Back at home, I pulled an old Pentium II laptop from the closet and blew off the dust. I reformatted and reinstalled everything and then set out to make it really simple to use. I increased the font sizes (a lot) and changed the OS settings to that everything is activated with a single click. I created accounts with Yahoo! Mail and MSN Messenger. I placed icons on the desktop for the web sites that Grams would want to see - her local newspaper, Google, our personal web site, the Seniors For Peace web site (a group that she co-founded). Then I set up MSN Messenger to send a help request to my own account with a single button press. This is done using the "request remote assistance" feature which allows me to take full control of the computer from my own. The computer was all set.

The next week we drove back up to Mill Valley, placed the computer on her desk, turned it on, and connected it to the wireless network. I was prepared to begin the technology education. This is also when Grams, pulled out her notepad and pen, adjusted her bifocals, and proceeded to educate me.

I knew I was in trouble when she started writing things like "move arrow to top right corner of box and press the red X". The mouse was the first major challenge. She would move it ever so slowly into position, lift her hand and with the tip of her index finger press the left mouse button. But without the weight of her hand on the mouse, it moved and she missed the target. After a few frustrating tries, I needed to show her that sometimes you had to pick up the mouse and move it back if it runs off the mouse pad. The concept of Windows that can be moved, minimized and closed was completely foreign. And you can imagine how the conversation sounded when we started talking about hyperlinks, the web, and spam. She tried and tried and tried, all the while telling me how patient I was and feeling badly. But it was she that was the patient one. I realized I had tremendously underestimated how much there was to learn.

Let me pause for a moment and be clear about something. Grams is a very bright person. Our conversations are often polite volleys on current politics, religion, and philosophy. She attended Stanford University in the 1930s and loves to tell stories of her tall, handsome, football player boyfriend named Dave Packard. A few years later he and his friend Bill Hewlett started their electronics company.

Over the next week Grams was amazed that people responded so quickly when she sent emails to them. She was hearing from friends who lived in distance locations and she wanted me to add more email addresses that she had collected from her friends. But her frustration with the computer overwhelmed her. She asked a friend "who knows about computers" to come over and help, but she just messed it up worse. I had asked Grams to not turn the computer off to keep things simple, but this was yet another paradigm change for her. Her friend turned the computer off and they were never able to get it to boot after that. A few weeks later the laptop came back to me with an apologetic note attached.

This where the discussion begins. Where do I go from here? As a technologist in this field, my first instinct is to sit down and crank out some code. I pondered this for a while and figured I could create an application that

• Eliminates the mouse. Keyboard only, since seniors are familiar with them.
  
• Is super simple - just the basics. Only sends and receives from people in the contact list to avoid spam, Email window always stays on top
  
• Has big, clear labels for Reply and Forward and Delete, etc.
  
• Embed a web browser in the app…but then wouldn't I need a mouse?
  

But all this still leaves Grams with a Windows PC that requires administration. Perhaps a Linux box would be a better platform to start with.

Yes, I know this path has been paved with the corpses of other well-intended products like WebTV and the internet appliances of the late 90's, but where does it leave us? What options does someone like Grams have?

My wife's aunt sent me a note about a product called Presto. According the PCWorld article, "the service allows you to send e-mail, including photo attachments, to a Presto e-mail address. There, the service converts the e-mail and any attached photos into customizable layouts ready to print out on a $150 HP A10 Printing Mailbox (currently the only Presto-enabled device). " This was the first I had heard of this product that HP seems to have an association with, so I'll have to claim some ignorance. I really like the idea of simple appliance that prints out emails. The big limitation, of course, is that it's only used for receiving emails, not sending them.

I am still intrigued by this challenge. On the surface it is deceptively simple. How hard can it be to create a product with a simple interface for sending text and receiving text and photos?

So given an environment with free WiFi and a phone line, what would you do get Grams back on the grid? Please don't tell me that WebTV is still the only answer :(