[ubuntu-uk] Comunity meetups

[Alan Pope]

On 27 October 2010 22:33, Neil Greenwood <neil.greenwood.lug at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 27 October 2010 00:12, Andrés Muñiz Piniella <andresmp at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Is the people nearby account in epifany supposed to help?
> Doubt it. It searches the local LAN, rather than looking at
> geographical location.
>

Once upon a time there was a windows only messenger system called
"Trepia" which was supposed to be geolocation based. The idea being it
would only list people nearby. It was pretty rubbish and generally
didn't show you anyone nearby, but people in another country. However
on a few occasions I "got lucky" and discovered someone in the next
town to me. I still keep in touch with him now, 7 years later, via
twitter, and even play scrabble with him on my phone regularly.

The protocol was reverse engineered and even ported to Pidgin (GAIM at
the time) so people on non-windows platforms could join in.

http://www.adammil.net/blog/view.php?id=29 - "Reverse engineering Trepia "

So there's certainly a market for geolocation based messenger systems,
but there's not one that actually works sadly. Of course services like
FourSquare and Gowalla are getting there, but it's not the same.

Cheers,
Al.