Serendipity: A Wireless, Proximity-Based Dating Service

The New Scientist has a recent article on an MIT Media Lab project called Serendipity, which seeks to enable people to discover potential dates in their vicinity. According to the article, people would be able to subscribe to a service in which they would create a personal profile and then associate that profile with their bluetooth-enabled mobile phone. Whenever a subscriber’s phone detects another bluetooth phone (within a ~10m range), it checks with the service to see whether that other phone is also associated with a subscriber profile, and if so, and their profiles are compatible, the service would issue alerts both phones.

This seems like a tamer version of ‘toothing’, and is reminiscent of some ideas we developed in our Blogger Bridges research project. However, I can’t find any further details about the project, and I think many of them are important, e.g., how compatibility is determined, how users specify their availability and how users are alerted. I can imagine a great deal of social awkwardness resulting if there weren’t steps taken to ensure some kind of plausible ignoreability, as we propose in our work.

I’m also reminded of the SpotMe Conference Navigator, a PDA-based service that enables conference attendees to be alerted when people with similar interests are in the vicinity. A Wall Street Journal article (23 Jan 2003) reported on its use at the International Students Committee Symposium at St. Gallen University; along with several positive impacts of the technology, they reported that "one female participant told me she could imagine the Spotme making her feel like a captive in a singles’ bar being scrutinized by interested men." Any service that is specifically targeted toward dating will clearly have to very careful in the way it incorporates privacy measures into the design.

Nathan Eagle is quoted as saying that there are user settings that incorporate social network system capabilities, e.g., one can say only send a profile to a friend of a friend. danah boyd recently reported that many people enjoy "fakesters" on Friendster; I suspect that in bridging the gap from the digital to the physical world, with the attendant increased risk of stalking, such gaming behavior in social networks may not be so amusing.