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Location-Based
Buddies
By Bill Mann
Your Tablet
PC is highly mobile. It goes with you as you move around the office. It
goes with you on business trips. As long as you can get an Internet connection
(wired or wireless) your Tablet PC lets you stay connected to your friends
and coworkers. The location of your friends and coworkers is irrelevant.
But sometimes
location is the important thing. Suppose you're at a conference and want
to talk to someone who is an expert on some subject related to that conference.
In this case, you want to locate and contact someone at the conference,
instead of contacting someone you know.
Or you are
in a hotel in a new city and are looking for something to do. It would
be cool to be able to find out if someone else from your hometown is staying
at the hotel, or hook up with some baseball fans to talk about the big
game.
Trepia is
a free program designed to help you connect with people in situations
like these. The program takes advantage of wired or wireless Internet
connections to show you information about people who are physically near
you. Each Trepia user creates a profile which can include information
like their name, interests, profession, languages they speak, even IM
IDs. You can also include a photo.
The Trepia
system uses this information to display information about other Trepia
users who are online at the time, sorted by proximity: that is, the closer
the user is to you geographically, the closer they appear to the top of
the list. So people in the same town appear higher on your list than people
in the next state, and so on. Double-click a person in the Trepia window
to send them an IM on the Trepia system. By basing the position of people
on their proximity to you, Trepia makes location-dependent scenarios like
the ones described earlier possible.
Trepia has
additional features that let you do things like invite friends to use
the product, rate contacts (cool, sweet, clever, and so on), send a contact
email (if they have listed an email address in their profile), or send
them an IM using one of the standard IM programs like AIM or Yahoo! Messenger
(if they have listed IDs for those services).
I have just
begun using Trepia, so I can't tell you how well all this works in real
life. I can tell you that Trepia has received write-ups in publications
like USA Today, Wired, and Business Week. Trepia should have a lot of
appeal for Tablet PC users. After all, we're the ones who are roaming
the planet with these great mobile computers with built-in wireless connections.
The ability to find nearby people with similar interests (or at least
nearby people with similar interests who are using Trepia) could be very
handy.
The question
is whether enough people will adopt Trepia to make it truly useful. And
the jury is still out on that.
To try Trepia
yourself, visit www.trepia.com and download a copy. Let me know what you
think of it by emailing me at bill@techforyou.com.
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