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..."

Comments

What ever happened

[Timesprout]

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.

Re:What ever happened

[Stuart Gibson]

This is different how? Joining a computer chat system to meet people interested in chatting on computers.

It may not be the be all and end all of social interaction, but if people enjoy it, what's the problem?

Goblin

WIDE open to abuse

[spoco2]

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.

Re:WIDE open to abuse

[fishbot]

It is a sad world, however, when it is necessary to judge a technological advancement by how it will be abused by perverts and child abusers.

I'm not saying your comment isn't true, as it most certainly is. It's just a shame, that's all.

Re:WIDE open to abuse

[Troed]

... or, he could go down to the nearest school. Damn society, providing pedos with easy access like that.

Seriously - give it up.

Re:WIDE open to abuse

[Ed Avis]

Nonsense. Why should we take it for granted that 12-year-olds require supervision to use the Internet? They go to public libraries. I'd draw a distinction between deliberate acts like looking at 'bad' information (eg, pictures) and accidental acts like accidentally disclosing your location, getting your PC cracked, installing spyware not knowing what it did, and so on. The former probably can't be solved with technology, short of pressing the off switch, but the latter can and should.

The particular problem here is that of privacy. If the software broadcasts your name and location to just anyone then the software is not trustworthy. OTOH, if the software has some means of controlling the distribution of that information then it might be okay to run it. (I'm sure there are plenty of holes in the particular system I suggested about verifying the identity of other users before telling them your age, but anyway.)

Almost all interesting problems on the Internet are a mixture of technical and social. Take passwords for example. They can be socially engineered out of people, or read from sticky notes stuck to monitors. But still you should do all you can on the technical side to make them as secure as possible (eg, if they are random enough while still being easily memorized, perhaps people won't need to write them down).

Revoltion?

[lateralus]

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...

Re:Amazing

[MikeFM]

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.

Unimpressed

[nmg196]

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...