Contacts Nearby
The Contacts Nearby application allows users to discover geographic locations of other people in their extended social network. Social networks or “friend graphs” are increasingly popular on the internet because they enable applications to learn of trust relationship between users. Combine this information with the geographical location of each user and you get a valuable tool in possible emergency situations.
Imagine being on site at an emergency situation. You might have the best aid workers or medical staff within a hand's reach. The Contacts Nearby application lets you see if you have contacts in common and allows you to ask for referrals from mutual contacts. This information can accelerate finding useful contacts in your area and building trust with them.
Key requirements:
- Allow you to specify your location via web, SMS, email - using a latitude and longitude or an address
- Allow you to specify your privacy preferences for who is allowed see your current position.
- Use an existing "friend graph" you might be maintaining on social networking sites like Facebook or LinkedIn
- Allow you to query which contacts are nearby via the web, email or SMS, using maps and text messages
- See contacts of contacts who are in the area
- Ask the "mutual contact" for a referral or "hookup" email or message
- You should receive updates when a contact enters your neighborhood.
This project takes advantage of the following technologies:
- Facebook as a provider for social information.
- Google Maps for visualization of geographical information.
- Google Maps Geocoding Services to translate addresses into positions.
- InSTEDD’s Twitter Bot technology which enables communication over SMS messages.
- An ASP.NET web application to integrate the application with Facebook.
- Facebook.NET - an open source library for developing Facebook application with .NET.
Developers:
- Source code, wiki and technical discussions at: http://code.google.com/p/contactsnearby/
- Source is available under The MIT License.
Interested in using this?
Current Status:
Currently the Friends Nearby application is available as a technical preview and integrates with Facebook’s social network capabilities. In addition, future development should enable integration with any social network tool that supports the Open Social specification as well as tighter integration with InSTEDD’s directory and Identity store.