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Hey, where are you guys?

June 30, 2003

Where's my dream guy / girl? Where are my friends? Is there anything happening anywhere? Young people are commonly preoccupied by such questions. When a group spontaneously gets together, it's likely that others will want to join in. To arrange such get-togethers, teenagers frequently use SMS via their mobile phones. Especially with large groups, this can lead to the constant pushing of buttons and accordingly high costs.

A more elegant solution - because it's centralised - is being offered by BuddySpots. This new system, developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST in Dortmund, allows teenagers to quickly determine whether a trip to the ice cream parlour, the cinema or the petrol station would be worthwhile. This assumes of course that the system is fed via SMS in real-time mode with the necessary data such as user ID (nickname), location and approximate duration of an event.

When activated for public, BuddySpots will be used from a mobile phone or from a PC with Internet access. After logging on, the display shows the user how many people are currently gathered at a particular place as well as their identities. Via mobile phone or using a PC, the user can also find a specific person by entering his or her nickname into the system. BuddySpots then sends the user an SMS, for example, giving him the location of the person he is looking for.

As business information systems specialist Rüdiger Gartmann points out, there is only one problem with the currently available short message services. "Because messages are restricted to a length of 160 characters, we can't always guarantee that the names of all attendees will be sent in the SMS." A better way is to access BuddySpots with a WAP-enabled mobile phone, which has a much greater display capacity.

By involving new project partners, the ISST researchers are considering design changes to make the system easier to use. If mobile phone network providers install the necessary technology, users would no longer have to enter their location data manually, and instead could be tracked automatically.

In addition, users could personalize their service by defining groups of friends whose location could be displayed according to priorities established by the user. An active notification system is also conceivable. This would allow users to be automatically informed when friends meet nearby. Despite the availability of modern information logistics, which could be interesting for field service technicians as well, in the end we will continue to enjoy the company of our friends the old-fashioned way.

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft

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