Ever wondered how often you narrowly miss bumping into a friend in the street or whether anyone you know is in the same cinema, park or airport as you? Finding out could soon be as simple as looking at the screen of your cellphone thanks to Socialight, a phone-based social networking service.
Once you’ve downloaded a small program, Socialight turns your cellphone into a ”friend radar”, alerting you whenever anyone on your Socialight buddy list is nearby. A central Socialight server tracks the whereabouts of each user using location data provided by cellphone carriers or from a global positioning system module in the phone, updating users’ cellphones every few seconds.
Socialight uses social networking ideas pioneered by websites such as Friendster, which encourage users to build a network of online friends they can contact by e-mail.
But Socialight takes this a step further: it takes advantage of the fact that in large cities you are unlikely ever to be far from at least one person you know, so rather than browsing your network of friends online, you can actually meet them, says Dan Melinger, one of the founders of Socialight.
Socialight also allows users to annotate space by leaving an invisible electronic message — called a sticky shadow — in a particular spot, either for a specific person or for a group of people. When someone walks through the spot, the message appears on their cellphone screen. After a meal in a restaurant, for example, you could leave a sticky shadow saying ”the food’s great here, but the coffee’s foul”. Crucially, you have to be part of a Socialight network to leave or receive sticky shadows.
Socialight is being tested in New York, and should be launched commercially around the world in the next year. — Â