Meet mates: a location-based social networking system put together by the University of Michigan.

Mates aims to connect people based on location as well as other commonalities - think connecting your IM with location data. People in your class. Your building. Your conference. A way to say introduce people who have a common link, or to give you a little ping when an old friend is nearby.

The Relationship Engine attempts to automatically determine user locations at any given point in time based on combinations of user input and statistical analysis. The RE can be sent explicit location information from a GPS device, a positioning system such as ekahau, or as the result of user input (clicking a point on a visual map, for example).

The Relationship Engine maintains information on user attributes as received from the user and other information stores such as LDAP directories. The RE generates relationships when these attributes change, and notifies users of relationship additions, deletions, and modifications that may affect them via a message queueing system. The RE and RSN currently compute and support relationships of the following types: friend, friend of friend, interest, course, and physical location.

The RS Navigator is a visual software client for the Relationship Engine. It features a live, animated visualization of related users in nearby locations, a buddy list, a messaging subsystem, and an interface for supplying attribute information to the Relationship Engine. The RSN also features a "location wall", allowing users to broadcast and receive location-related information and events to nearby users.

The project is based on open infrastructure so other applications can benefit from the work. Can we expect this built into mainsteam IM applications, or other social networking products? I hope so. Soon? Not likely. However, I think the backbone poses some interesting queries. It's been a while since I've tried to generate any new friends based on search criteria in the IMs - this, however, has more practical applications (or so I think).

I would love to, for example, know the people at a conference I'm attending. Have the ability to live chat while I event blog. I would also be really interested to know when friends, family or colleagues are in my area so we can meet up for coffee. These types of lists would be great if they were autogenerated based on integration with my calendar.

Via SmartMobs.