Squace blog

I recently read a research paper (From Awareness to Repartee: Sharing Location within Social Groups, click here for .pdf) that discussed a new way to use GSM triangulation to automatically microblog about your position. If you for instance were somewhere, say at work, you could name, or tag, that location by typing “Work” in your phone. Every time you then were within a 70 meter radius (give or take) your status would update to “At Work”.

If you stay for a longer period of time, it would change to “At Work since 12:17 am”. Then when you left, it would change to “Left Work at 2:23 pm” until you enter another known (or named) location. Locations could be your own or reached by a closed group consensus, so you could optionally reuse someone elses “Home” so it would say “At Ernies Home” if you were at Ernies place.

You could also turn off automatic updates if you for example snuck off to an interview over lunch.

I think this is a vary nice take on microblogging (like twitter and jaiku already do well) since it requires very little recurring effort from the user, and the level of detail is entirely up to you.

For our users, it could add a few nice new fun things to do in Squace. First, you could see where all your contacts are (if they want to show you of course).

Second of all, we can help our users to find new stuff in squace based on what they usually do “At Home” or “At Work”.

Relevancy on a whole new level!