Celeste Biever writes for New Scientist on an MIT Media Lab project — Serendipity — that determines when potential contacts are proximal to each other by utilising the short-range Bluetooth system capabilities built into a growing number of cellphone models. According to Celeste:
Bluetooth transceivers put each user inside a 10-metre radius "bubble" within which they can connect with similar devices… The Serendipity software needs an always-on - GPRS or 3G - phone and would "sniff" for Bluetooth signals twice a minute. If it finds one, it tells the database, via the net, which phone it has found. If the users' profiles match, they will be alerted and can seek each other out.
Utilising the same type of 'friend of a friend' identification systems built into currently popular social networking services, a Serendipity user would be able to limit their social 'exposure' to a discreet group of people — allowing the user to set the degrees of separation of those who would find them out and about and face to face.
The idea is that you are more likely to trust the people your friends already know. But such settings need not be permanent. They might reflect a mood or a situation. If you are out with work colleagues or family, you might not want to know about close matches but may only want to be informed when an unmissable match is in your vicinity.
The 'Serendipity' service described in this New Scientist article is similar in concept to a service that I have been brainstorming with my social software cohort — sans the 'dating' focus. There are obviously many concerns and criteria that would have to be calculated to make a service like Serendipity viable. Celeste ends her article with comments from the following:
Mark Granovetter, a sociologist at Stanford University in California, says that by exposing ourselves to ever larger numbers of people through social sites we risk spreading ourselves too thinly: "Some worry that as these technologies become more common, people will become overloaded with networking requests and start to ignore them." And Cameron Marlowe, a social networks researcher also at MIT warns that it would be a constant distraction. "You wouldn't want to switch it off just in case." But Paul Martino, founder of tribe.net, thinks wireless-based introductions are unstoppable: "When proximity computing meets social networking, very interesting things will happen," he predicts. "The industry will go in that direction eventually."
1. I have been thinking about similar things for some time:
http://zby.aster.net.pl/kwiki/kwiki.cgi?MobileSocialSoftware
I focused there on the usage of such systems "in bars, clubs, pubs and all the other places where people go to meet strangers and have fun together."
It's good to see the technology that could support such ideas.
Posted at 8:04PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Zbigniew Lukasiak