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Plazes is your friend.

Several years back (about 2002), a private group of mobile enthusiasts that I am involved with, talked about what the next killer app will be. One of the things that came up was a location-based messaging service we termed that time as hypermessaging.

Basically, think of Jaiku or Twitter now, but each message is geo-tagged. There is so much potential in such an app -- finding friends, querying what's up in the area, finding the best deals, finding items for sale in the area, leaving virtual notes to someone, tracking services, etc, etc -- so much potential.

More importantly, this kind of service create communities (mind you, social networking wasn't even popular 5 years ago when we were discussing this killer app). Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, gave us an insight on how (virtual) communities are created. Think New York -- China Town, Little Italy, SoHo, etc. -- how did those communities start? What triggered their decisions to stay at that part of Manhattan?

Well I digress, but notice how new devices that are coming out now have built-in GPSes. 'Where am I?' or 'Where are you?' when put into a much bigger context, can be so much encompassing.

No wonder Google bought Jaiku.

Check out this company. They have it going in the right direction. It's for S60 as of now, but you can use a browser. Maybe they will be interested in the N810 eh?

http://www.hipoqih.com/

I brought me N800 to Wacken ( http://www.wacken.com/ ) this year but there was noway I was going to bring it into the stage/band area.....

surveillance = bad

What I always wanted my mobile to do:

Allow people on a contact list to be alerted (via their mobiles) when we're within a certain distance of each other. So when I'm shopping and by chance am two blocks away from a friend who's out for lunch, he will receive a text message reading "Benny is in this area right now; want to call him?". We could have lunch together then.

Some time ago I read about a carrier here implementing this for his customers, but its not much use if locked to one network.

An application like this for the N810 would be nice an could work well by combining GPS and Jabber - provided enough people buy the thing.

GeoJabber would work well for that.

Reggie as I am sure you recall when we were sitting in the session at the Web2Summit it was clear via Jaiku that at least 3 other people were there while others joined us virtually. The Cell ID data is available now through Jaiku and your phone... with GPS on the Tablet (and the open API) it's only a matter of time until someone gets creative here.

I'd ideally love to share the CellID from the N95 as that would allow the tablet to get info without GPS unless asked which could save battery life considerably -- though my proporta mobile power charger can handle that if needed.

This idea has so many wonderful uses, but sadly it can be so easily abused. As such I think the idea is a non-starter for many people, or at the very least will be used by far less people than you would think might find it useful.