Courtesy of textually.org I learned about Proxidating, a bluetooth proximity dating service for cellphones. But they don't support my Sony Ericsson phone!

Marc riffs on the recent Handwave at Synchronous Social Software, although not about the synchronous aspect of what I was pushing at, but on the geolocation element:

[from Plazes, Gush, and Blog Comment Threading

His wish list goes on to include the 'best of breed' features of IM, geolocation services, RSS feeds, generic presence and trigger alert info, combining the capabilities of Plazes and Gush.

I have two separate sets of comments to make on this... one about the content, and one about where and how I make these comments (!).

Regarding the content: Stowe's wish-list is right on the money -- it deserves a more thoughtful reply than I can give it at the moment, so I merely wanted to flag a few other things swirling around in that space that are starting to address these same needs:

a) BuddySpace, naturally, with its location-centric presence info... not with 'live map' updates yet, but those are coming soon!!

b) Live IP -> Latitude/longitude information can be supplied more easily than the custom app you need to download for Plazes: check out the 'HitMap' in the upper right corner of my blog, which knows where visitors to my page come from, without them having to do anything.... cool, huh? This comes from KMi's Jiri Komzak, the same guy who implemented BuddySpace, and is described some more on KMi's HitMaps page.

c) Updating my colleagues regarding my past/current/future locations? Check out the map in the lower right of my blog gutter, which does exactly this, courtesy Bryan Boyer's IndyJunior!

Regarding Indy Junior -- too much work, man! Editing XML docs and figuring out the coordinates is too hard. But the guys at Plazes could keep a history of my logging in at various Plazes, and depict it as a part of my profile. They do parts of that already, including showing a daily update of new plazes on world and continental maps.

But then Marc wanders off into strange territory, first of all acting apologetic for his writing the post at My Dog, and not here at Get Real, where he is *supposed* to be guest blogging. But the tension inherent in the decision making about whether to blog here or there has led to some interesting speculations about the difficulties inherent in following cross blogthreads:

I'm continually amazed at the fact that blog comment discussion threads are such cumbersome beasts. I wrote previously with pointers to Jon Udell's comments on this and the new generation of Feedster and Bloglines citation bookmarklets. The challenge is to 'slice through the spaghetti' and obtain a sensible view of an emerging discussion thread, even though it is posted in disparate blog entries.

Citation bookmarklets are a stab in the right direction, but they are still too cumbersome. Blogs have the advantage of preserving a sense of self-ownership (hence my posting here rather than in a comment on someone else's blog). Forums and discussion threads have the advantage of preserving some semblance of context. Feeds have the advantage of providing steroid-driven-navigation. There are times and contexts in which any of these may be superior to the others. I think a good challenge is to let the user 'in situ' construct a mix of perspectives, i.e. peruse an 'in-line' (constructed-on-the-fly) comment-thread while reading a blog entry, rather than having to play detective, peruse feeds, or invoke a bookmarklet.

Toward this end, I have been brainstorming over the last few days with Bertrand Sereno, who is experimenting with semantic blogging. He's looking at ways to link blog entries together with semantic tags rather than mere faceless links or trackback pointers: tags that say something about why I'm linking to another entry. A challenge I've posed to Bertrand is to begin at the bookmarklet level and allow the two of us (or more if others join in) to carry on our brainstorming by means of parallel or 'yoked' blog entries, from which our discussion thread can be reconstructed on-demand. Another thing Bertrand is looking at in this respect is the notion of 'free-form' tags a la Flickr and del.icio.us, i.e. tags that are not constrained to be from a limited 'semantically credible' subset in the eyes of some High Priest of Ontology, but rather constructed at whim, in order to see what kind of tagging system evolves.

But what about various blogthreads efforts, like Dave Sifry's Technorati search embedded in MT (which David Weinberger calls "Threadorati")? [Note: I have added threadorati to Get Real, just now, so we can see what happens.]

I saw that a number of folks (including Joi) recently gawked at Plazes, a new social networking/proximity/mobility offering.

Joi Ito

[from Plazes and Wallop]

Yes. Yet another social networking site... I decided to play with this one for awhile before blogging it to make sure it was significantly different. I think it is. Plazes takes your IP address and tries to figure out where you are. If you are in a new "plaze" you can register it by entering the address, uploading pictures, making comments. You can see who is online and where they are. You can see people by how far away they are from you. I imagine that once it gets going, most common hang outs will have lots of comments and pictures and you will be able to find people in your vicinity to hook up with. It's a bit like a laptop version of dodgeball. I'm "Joi" on Plazes.

I'm not all there yet with the model of use, but there is a swarmth (karma) system involved based on creating new "plazes" -- the more you create the more swarmth you get. Presumably you can apply this in some way, but how you exploit swarmth is unclear to me at this time.

I encountered a now fixed Windows bug when I first installed, so it wasn't working until I reinstalled a new beta today. To bad. I could have tagged a few Starbucks in NYC Tu-We.

The service uses a "friends/others" duofold profile model, which I like. I have posted all my IM services there, and made them public, while I make email private, available only to friends.

I met Marc Eisenstadt a few months back, on the Vandals Tour of Europe that Greg and I did. He is the author of My Dog ("No, it's not about dogs."), and is the Chief Scientist of the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University in the UK:

I'm KMi's Chief Scientist, interested in fostering quality learning experiences with or without technology. My current work interests include very large scale presence via messaging and gaming; intelligent agents as mediating tools for human interaction; internet mapping and visualization; ubiquitous bandwidth and the educational challenge summed up by the phrase "wired... now what?".

My first interaction with Marc was through a technology that KMI has developed, called Flashmeeting (www.flashmeeting.com). I was really impressed with the ease of use, ergonomics, and functionality built into the web meeting application. We used it to organize the Social Tools for the Enterprise Symposium (held in London in July), and it really worked well for the meetings we were having with 8-12 attendees. The integration of lightly moderated video conferencing with chat made these meetings amazingly productive. I even spent most of one meeting sniping in the chat tab!

Some of my suggestions regarding Flashmeeting as a tool for interviews were immediately implemented, and I finally cornered Marc for an interview today.

Note: This initial interview shows all the signs of a thumb-fingered, unprepared interviewer. Forgive me; I'll do better in the future. My mike recording level was a little too low and Marc's is a little too loud. But what I am really interested in is the Flashmeeting tool as an interview device; although Marc's quick intro to KMi and their various initiatives is worth the time investment to replay the dialog.

You will note that the tool support time stamping with each "head shift" -- when one of the attendees takes control of the meeting, the tool records the shift. Each has its own URL, as well, which can be accessed by ALT-clicking on the timestamps in the scrollable margin: for example the suggested starting point of the interesting part of the interview is http://flash.kmi.open.ac.uk:8080/flashmeeting/memo.php?room=rockbake&password=b80e7f-449&jumptime=00:04:45, which was generated in this way.

At the bottom of the app is a timeline view, which can be played like a music or video player, and the timeframe elements are themselves active.

In the interview Marc offers a unique insight into the fusion of proximity and other online social cues to create "The Next Best Thing" to face-to-face interaction, in projects like Hexagon and Buddyspace.

I'm glad to say that Marc has graciously agreed to guestblog at Get Real for the next few weeks, and I will be trying to queue up a number of other interviews using Flashmeeting, as well.

Got some email amrketing today regarding a new "service" called SpotMe, but what caught my eye was a picture of some gizmo that looks like a PDA. Turns out that its a Spotme Conference Navigator, intended for use at events involving 100-thousands of participants.

The company behind all this is Shockfish of Lausanne Switzerland, and they develop the handheld "navigators" as well as the base stations that communicate to them, and PC-based software for messaging and data collection of various sorts.

I was struck by the fact that the system supports messaging from the event managers to the conferees, but not (apparently) a direct one-to-one instant messaging, except for a very structured coordination of meetings; at least that's the impression I got from the website.

They should incorporate an IRC or Jabber chatroom into the mix, along with 1:1 IM. And it should support the backchannel natively!

The device supports beaming of personal contact info from one device to ther other (including picture), and a handheld mechanism for viewing agenda, updates, and so on. Lacks other social networking stuff, no blogs, and I don't see how it would carry over after the event except for an email export of your "conference log" including contact info of the various folks you met.

Still, now that we at Corante are moving quickly into the conference business, this is the sort of technology I would like to see in use at our events, although it needs to be hooked into other technologies -- blogs, IM, etc. -- to link it events up with the rest of the world.

In preparation for my trip to Europe (including London), I stumbled onto this Wired story about "toothing" (which also introduced me to the British craze of "dogging": "an underground swinging scene where couples and sometimes third or fourth parties engage in public sex for an exhibitionist thrill.")

Daniel Terdiman

[from Wired News: Brits Going at It Tooth and Nail]

And now comes "toothing," where strangers on trains and buses and at bars and concerts hook up for clandestine sex by text messaging each other with their Bluetooth-enabled cell phones or PDAs.

"I've always loved the idea of random sexual encounters, but have never felt brave enough to go to (sex) parties," says Steve, a toother from Hitchin, England. "The beauty of toothing is that there's no pressure. I was reluctant to send messages at first, but the standard greeting, which I found out from (an online toothing forum) is so innocuous there is no chance of offending anyone by sending a random message."

According to the Beginner's Guide to Toothing, the online FAQ written by a man who calls himself Toothy Toothing, toothing is "a form of anonymous sex with strangers -- usually on some form of transport or enclosed area such as a conference or training seminar.... Users 'discover' other computers or phones in the vicinity and then send a speculative message. The usual greeting is: 'Toothing?'"

Maybe I'll rent a bluetooth phone while I'm there...