Hi, my name is Thomas Schreiber. I'm currently working on my fourth
year of a bachelors of science of computer science at Portland State
University. Last night I brought up an idea I had on #statusnet for a
possible GSoC project. My idea is to create a mobile app that would
limit what status updates were shown to a mobile device user to the
immediate area the user is current inhabiting. This would be useful
for ad-hoc location based social gaming such as Mafia Wars and
scavenger hunts. Other ad-hoc congregations such as conferences would
benefit by being able to see what was happening around them that they
might otherwise have missed. A third use would be location based
reviews/advice (I'm thinking something like Gowalla, but tied to
geo-locations and not storefronts) which could aid users not only at
stores, but at parks, museums, and just about anywhere.
While limiting the radius of the viewable updates may seem
counterintuitive, I believe it comes from a social practice that is
alive and vibrant. Street artists have been tagging short messages and
their names around cities for years. With the ethical issues of
tagging circumvented with this technology, I imagine this app as a
popular social experience. It's social geo-caching where the prize is
discovering each other.
The project would consist of the following components:
* Set up a StatusNet server that will only allow mobile apps to see status
updates (letting people look up the updates from home would ruin the
fun. :P). This will be a quick and simple task.
* I need to come up with the size of the location radius and other such
metrics. Ideally these will be dynamic and adjustable by the StatusNet
server that the user is connected to. I would probably set this up as a
simple plugin that makes this information available
* The bulk of the time will be spent writing an intuitive user friendly app
that differs from Mustard in how it presents information. For the social
gaming aspect I might add in an interface for score keeping that would
communicate with the StatusNet plugin mentioned above.
* Optionally, I can port the android app to Meego. I have worked on QT4 in
the past, and this should not be that difficult. However, there is
rumor that
Intel may be working on porting the android runtime environment to
Meego. Also, with only having 12 weeks I want to ensure that I have enough
time to do this project justice. For these reasons, I may hold off
on this part
of the project and perhaps revisit it after the summer if there is
significant
interest.
Thank you for your consideration. I know this project could be really
cool, and I look forward to you feedback so I can make it even more
so.
Thomas Schreiber
aka ubiquill on freenode
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