"Mobile Social Presence"

TheFeature :: Mobile Social Presence: Who Knows Who's Where Now?

At the technical level, I (Howard Rheingold) reported a few months ago on the work at HP Labs (MPEG) which allows people within Bluetooth range to discover if they have the same preferences without revealing them to each other. "Just what you need for the phenomenon of discovering in real space if you have a community," is how researcher Bernardo Huberman described it to me.
In user-innovation-land, BuddySpace is a Java-based, open-source instant messenger that adds map overlays to the buddy list, and moves the availability function to higher levels of granularity than "online," "offline" and "away." The UK research lab that created BuddySpace and makes it freely available via Sourceforge states: "By studying the semantics of presence, we can also augment the existing impoverished presence states in a principles manner, providing capabilities that are more representative of the way real users work. Forthcoming capabilities will include automatic location updates via mobile devices, and the use of semantic matchmaking via intelligent profile handling, in order to help users quickly find and filter colleagues of particular interest.