11/6/2005

Who’s next to me - Proximity based services

Yahoo just launched the next generation of their map services, finally moving on par with Google and MSN. Location based services seem all the rage these times, and almost daily some new website combining maps with some other service shows up (look at MapMyRun or Housingmaps for examples). But there is more to location than just answering the question „where is the next Pizza hut“. While restaurants, shops or apartements tend to be rather static, people are allways on the move. Say you are on a business trip to a foreign city, and a friend living far away happens to visit that city just about the same time. Of course, if neither you nor your friend informed each other about being in town, it is rather unlikely that you’ll meet in this scenario.
Enter proximity based services. A service like that could track your position, as well as the positions of people in your buddy list. If someone from your list gets closer to you than a defined value, you’d get a message informing you of the proximity of the other person. It would be sensible to set that treshold rather high for people usually far away, and correspondingly lower for people living near you anyway.
The first venture in this kind of service seems to be Meetro, kind of an instant messaging software, showing you which other Meetro users are around your current location. Plazes also has some proximity components, although I consider it more of a location based service (a pretty interesting one, by the way). Right now, these services still suffer from a lack of connectivity. Most people are not yet online wherever they move, but it is evident that wifi coverage is getting better and better and so is connectivity. Also the advancing proliferation of GPS equipment will improve such services, allowing much better tracking.
While the big three (Google, Yahoo and MSN) have not yet arrived on the proximity scene, they have established working instant messaging solutions and are very proficient in location based services. They might show up with something as soon as they consider the time has come.