Recently, my friend Joe Halliwell started a company called Blootag, and I’ve got a feeling they’re going to be big. As I mentioned in my previous entry, I had a chance to see Blootag in action at the EPIS birthday party. Their product amounts to a lovegety on your mobile phone: a Bluetooth application that talks to other phones running Blootag and shows a more or less detailed profile of each user. Once you’re a part of the Blootag ad-hoc network, you can message to potentially interesting date candidates, view their profiles and so on. Naturally, you can also use it to, you know, make friends. Or see if there’s anyone else on the bus who’s into those model railways… This could be the first proper implementation of the “taste tribes” featured in Cory Doctorow’s recent novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. The MIT Media Lab has been developing a framework called Serendipity for a while, but it looks like Blootag is getting there faster. And “blootagging” is certainly a much cooler word than the rather lame “bluedating” that MIT came up with.
In any case, it does sound like a killer app for Bluetooth: the protocol has been around for a while, but it doesn’t really seem like it has been used for much besides backing up your address book and transferring those embarrassing, grainy cameraphone shots to your hard drive. And sure, those wireless headsets are funky, but it’s about time somebody did something real with this neat piece of engineering that is just lying around. Pervasive computing, p2p, you name it — as Howard Rheingold put it, a technological revolution is not complete until you can carry it around with you, and Bluetooth could really be the mobile phone equivalent of the Internet in terms of impact.
Blootag also gives me an excellent excuse to plug my short story,Shibuya no Love, still up at Futurismic. I don’t think Joe has quite yet finished implementing the whole “dating across different Everett multiverse branches” feature, but one lives in hope…
“Shibuya no Love” was actually a really great story, i really enjoyed it. i think i read an old beta though, so i never bothered with the published version. hmm, arXiv vs an established journal really
Talking to girls makes me nervous and my hands go all clammy, and I can never think of interesting things to say. What a good thing that from now on, my mobile device will do the talking! Bring on the babes!
It even works for me (= a person that would never never never never use such a thing), as I would be the dark, mysterious, lovegety-less stranger.
It actually is such an utter mystery for me, how do people (of opposite sexes, that is) actually meet up, but I still find it a fascinating mystery. I may withdraw this opinion once/if I receive verifiable information that someone has gotten some nookie through a lovegety
Wouldn’t a real tough-as-nails otaku geek prefer cybersex anyway!??!