Students and non-students at UCLA have been trying out SmallPlanet’s CrowdSurfer technology on the UCLA campus. Running on Nokia 6600 and 6230 phones, the application uses Bluetooth radio signals to find other users up to 100 feet away while relationship information is made available via GPRS connections to the SmallPlanet.net web site.
“This is true location-based, mobile social networking,” says SmallPlanet’s Ken Torimaru, who led the development of CrowdSurfer. “We are giving users the option to know when friends are nearby and to meet new people with whom they share some common, previously invisible connection, and we’re doing it in the real world; in real time, in real place.”
The application allows users to create their own profile settings such as “social” or “business” to filter exactly what information is being revealed depending on what type of environment they are in. “It’s not just about changing the dating scene at bars, think about how useful it would be at large business conferences, or just in everyday life,” exclaims Heaney.
CrowdSurfer is not alone.
Dodgeball.com, a friendster for mobile phones , just launced in 5 new cities: Austin, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and Washington DC.
When members want others to know their whereabouts, they use their cellphone to send a text message (like “@ Luna Lounge”) to the Dodgeball e-mail address for their respective city. The service then sends an automated text message with the user’s name, location and a head shot to all of their Dodgeball friends, as well as any friends of friends who have checked in within a 10-block radius.
Wi-Fi tracking programs like the UCSD’s Active Campus Project, provide similar “live” location information for campus-wide WiFi networks.
AT&T’s Find Friends, was the first (and I believe still the only) service to be offered by a major cellular carrier that can find nearby friends. WaveMarket (left), a pioneer in location-based blogging, has a location-based blogging system that enables users to broadcast and share location-time information from their cell phones with friends, affinity groups or the world.
AtomicLava, like other phone blogging software has a Smartphones client that lets you to post videos from a cell phone.
The Socialsoftwareweblog covers centralized social software like Friendster, Tribe.net and Orkut (Google), which let you find people of similar interests (& friends). Fandango s Evite lets you pick a movie, invite friends, and let everyone vote on a time and place, and then everyone can click back to Fandango to purchase their tickets in advance.
Friend of a Friend (FOAF) takes a decentralized approach. FOAF profiles are normal XML text files that are stored on your website. This means that the data about yourself belongs to you and not to the social software site. It gives you the power to put the data back in your control, and on a server/website that is controlled by you.
XFN (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a ‘rel’ attribute to their tags.
Flickr, created by Many to Many blogger, Stewart Butterfield, is a recent example of social software. Flickr, like all great social networking services, lets you add your profile and photo, add your friends, click on your friends to see their friends.
DailyWireless has more on Tagging Location with GPS.
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