Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Well, you can play Hitchhiker’s Guide it from anywhere that has an internet connection. It’s playable via an IM robot that’s connected up to an emulated version of the game. You simply type commands to it and it IMs you back what you see, and you can even save and load your game when it’s time to go do other things, like work.

You don’t even need an IM program to use it. If you can load up Google Mail and use Google Talk in the browser, you can connect to it as well. That’s because Google Talk is based entirely on the open source Jabber messaging platform, so anyone on Google Talk can IM with anyone else on a Jabber-based system, including the IM bot.

From the beginning Jabber has been billed as an XML-based platform-neutral solution for all sorts of presence and communications needs, be it from machine to machine, person to person, and person to machine. To date it’s mostly been used for IM chats. Google’s use of the technology in its own Talk servers has given it a much higher profile, but for years I’ve been wondering why game publishers who want ready-made text chat and file transfer support in online lobbies and communications with people inside and outside of games don’t just bring in the known, open-source Jabber technology and get it over with. That said, it’s entirely possible that some online communities are already using Jabber servers that don’t accept outside connections, and we’d never know.

Anyhow, if you want to read more about the Jabber to Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, check out the blog entry here, which was llinked to by Kotaku.