Maintaining emotional connections over distances is hard, as anyone who has traveled or been away from a loved one for a long time can tell you. The current state of retail mobile technology and services allows us to stay in touch with voice, text, various types of emoticons and sounds.

Lately, a number of design concepts have emerged around, of all things, the pillow. The lowly pillow is an interesting but compelling choice as an interface object for social interaction over distances -- its the first thing we see in the morning and the last thing we see at night. And some pillows in German hotels are clearly thin enough to be display screens already (sorry, had to slip that in there having stayed awake at night in German hotels wondering where the concept of "pillow" went).

We Make Money Not Art has a round-up of interesting pillow-based communication concepts worth having a look at. Could they bee the next killer app in f2f communications?