We Make Money Not Art has an interview with Burak Arikan up, who is the lead developer of OpenIO and Pinkie. Prior to reading the interview, I had no idea what either were, but they sound very cool, like most things that come out of the Media Lab:
Pinkie is a network based electronics prototyping board. Pinkie has been designed to easily compose sensors and actuators that reside in different locations. Pinkies are inherently invisible, they hide behind the structures and only serve as facilitators to interface the physical world to the digital network.
Open I/O works like a peer-to-peer file sharing program, rather then sharing media files in your PC, you share data sensed from your physical environment. While Pinkies are organizing the low-level information (e.g., sensing the world), Open I/O is for higher concepts such as managing distributed devices, collaboration, and social networking.
This sounds to be a very interesting project. It seems like the floodgates are starting to open on small hardware devices that are open and easily programmable. Since there are so many of these devices, it seems only natural that they need social networking.