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Trepia: A Buddy List Of Strangers
An anonymous reader writes "Trepia has released an IM client that automatically populates itself with people who happen to be around you. Something that has been done before by Apple with iChat, but Trepia claims to be 'iChat on crack' in this article featuring the software. This could have potentially revolutionary social effects..."
FP? ;) ...
No, but seriously: at the moment I'm already getting irritated by the increasing amount of spam I receive via MSN (using Trillian & GAIM), so what might happen with this innovative product? Don't get me wrong, I love to get to know new people, but I'm a bit sceptic if this wouldn't attract a lot of "noise"
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
To joining a gym to meet people who are interested in staying in shape, joining a book club to meet people who are interested in books, joining a tiddly winks club to meet people (OK sad individuals) interested in tiddly winks?
Life is a lot more fun if you actually get out there and live it.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Ok... say a peadophile says that he is a '12 year old boy who likes sports' or similar... bingo... there's his list of boys in his area...
Bad, bad idea.
The problem with this sort of technology is that you must give it a decent amount of personal information before it can do its thing. Many are reluctant to give such information, and that fact alone could sink the whole thing.
-danielrm26
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
"Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
When I walk outside I rarely ever get excited or even mildly interested in the fact that numerous other people are in my vicinity. In fact the trend in highly populated cities is to ignore your neighbors.
I think that it was Cliff Stoll who said that computers make us disconnect from our neighbors and families. This software facilitates a society where everyone knows each other without actually having met.
I can imagine a cafe with several people chatting, only every one of them is looking into his/her computer screen utterly oblivious that they are chatting with the person beside them.
"Software for shy people - We make you new friends... so YOU don't have to!"
Rant over and out. I have to answer someone on IRC...
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
Meeting people online is a lot cheaper, safer, and easier than most real life methods. I don't like clubbing (who can afford $50/night to try to pick up drunk women who won't like you when they are sober), I don't go to school or church, I usually don't meet many people in my work as a programmer (especially single women), and most the people I hang out with are all geeks which means 95% male. I don't feel I have the time or money to invest in trying to pick women up in the old fshioned ways so online methods can be a big help.
The safety factor could be a big plus for women especially. You aren't likely to be slipped a date rape drug and find yourself tied to hotel bed while being gang raped if your meeting through the Net. Sure you have some risk when you eventually do meet the people in real life but you get some chance to screen people before going out with them.
People who think pedos are going wild online are a bit mistaken. Sure there are some but there are a lot more that are out there in real life. It'd be a lot easier to grab some brat off the street or playground than to arrange to meet them off the Net. Anything online leaves a paper trail and you can't know if the person you're talking to really is Lil Tommy or Agent Nutcracker or even Lil Tommy's parents. The majority of underage folks that get 'kidnapped' by online friends are freaky folks that are out banging anything they can anyway or at least wishing they were. Mostly horny teenagers that are wanting to get picked up.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Ok, this application sucks.. passwords are PLAIN TEXT TOO! Couldn't they have at least implemented some sort of challenge/response method?
How different would that be than joining an IRC channel for your local area and ask "12 year old boy who likes sports, wanna chat?" I don't think this program will hand out your name and address anymore than IRC will. It's basicly trying to edge in on IRCs turf, providing "channels" of common interests and location if you ask me.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Been there, done that, found it to expensive and not very satisfying. I live to code and build cool things so anything that interferes with that is bad.. which includes drugs, alcohol, caffine, and women. I'd like to give up working pathetic sucky jobs too but I've yet to find a way to make a living just inventing stuff. Maybe if I had a PhD or a rich uncle or something I could get paid for crazy R&D stuff. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The idea is sound, but the implementation is flawed. I mainly seem to get people in the US, even though I'm in the UK (6000+ miles is hardly close) and nobody on the list is in my country even though my friend about a mile away has it installed and running.
In my experience, trying to guess where people are by their IP address doesn't work very well. It would work much better if you could simply add the locations you are at most often by country/postcode or even just grid reference and it used those instead. Even people on the same subnet as me could be hundreds of miles away if they're dialling in. If people have sold of or subleased blocks of IP addresses to other countries, the records could even indicate the wrong location or wrong country anyway - so it may always think I'm in Finland when actually I'm in England... I'm not impressed.
I wrote an IM client myself which simply discovered people on the same subnet using broadcasts - and even that seemed to be more effective at finding my friends and colleagues than this (admittedly broadcasts don't usually work on public networks).
Nick...
Yet Another Instant Messenger
Seriously, this idea is very nice, and I really hope it has a future, but as I see it, it's yet another instant messenger. The problem with this is that most people decide to use one, maybe two, IMs. Okay, so now we have ICQ, AIM, MSN, Jabber, and many many more. Of course, this is just day-dreaming: but wouldn't it be great if there was just one (OSS) IM platform, like Jabber? Jabber is great, unfortunately, it's not in the Top3 IM systems. Ideas like this should had been implemented into Jabber, then it could have a future, now it's just another IM people can choice from. Okay, now I'm gonna check where all the fuzz is about...
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
> I don't feel I have the time or money to invest
> in trying to pick women up in the old fshioned
> ways so online methods can be a big help.
The way you talk about it ("time nor money", "pick up women") you don't sound like you're ready for a relationship at all. Getting to know someone costs a lot of time and energy, and, since you bring it up: yes, usually money as well. The internet is no shortcut to that. Granted, it might be easier to find people sharing your interests, but the lion's share of the considerable investment of building something together remains the same.
Being well balanced is overrated. -- John Carmack
Since there's no Mac, Linux, or Java version, I guess your profile implicitly marks you as a Microsoft customer.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
So...because you don't want this, it's a bad thing? Is anyone forcing you to download and isntall it? Simple solution: don't run it and you won't be bothered when you're busy with whatever McTask that is so important. Problem solved.
Why so violent over someone designing something potentially neat?
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
IANAL, and neither are you. My IP address is public. The internet wouldn't work to well if it wasn't. Also, you say "they also claim ownership of all materials you send through their application" whereas they say "Trepia, Inc. is free to use any ideas, know-how, concepts, techniques or other materials you send us for any purpose." The difference being they say and material you send _to_ them, not _through_ their service. Again, IANAL, but it don't think it is as bad as you make it out to be. Finally, you shouldn't discuss valuable ideas over any open network no matter what their policy is. Use a chat system that supports encryption for that. And is it a privacy violation if they tell you they are doing it? I don't think so.