I’m looking for someone...

Update: TagMap is that app I was thinking of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18H5FBoGL3o
Apparently, any idea you have will be turned into business by somebody else.
Check the Bump.

Buzzwords:

• Android app
• Location aware
• Social communication
• Online, Web 2.0

Preamble

Imagine you’re on the business trip (or vacation) in some other city (like Berlin). You’ve done your business (or sightseeing) and have some time until you go to bed. You might feel very lonely in a large (or small) town. There might be people all around you, locals, foreigners and even from the your country (or even city). Imagine an app which would allow you to get connected to some other lonely people out there (some maybe just around the corner).
So if such an application would exist, you would put your mobile device on the key-chain and let it hang on your breast (or belly) showing (or blinking) a message saying:

 

Note the text in square brackets: it’s the selectable intention for a meeting. This is required in order to filter out contacts from people with dirty intentions.
You would walk around and occasionally somebody would read that directly from your hanging mobile device and start talking to you in real life (dream on!).
In practice, you would have to switch to a map mode where you will see placemarks indicating peoples’ location which have this app working with a call-out with their selected intention for a meeting. It may look like this:
 
Isn’t that awesome?
You could start moving in the direction of the person that interests you and look for someone with a cell phone hanging saying “I’m lonely too”.
A chat can be initiated in order to clear the incentives prior to meeting in reality to save some time running to different people just to find out they have found a boyfriend/girl already.
Some bullet points:

• Privacy is an issue. Allow controlling visibility of the photo and other personal details (origin country, languages spoken, real name, twitter/facebook accounts). Private information can be exchanged during the chat (automatically, not by manual copy/paste/send, of course).
• Allow disappearing from peers map if absolutely not interested in contacting somebody (strange looks, disliked nationality, etc.)
• Gender is a must (male, female, male gay, female gay (lesbian)). This probably should not be hide-able as some people just plainly don’t want to meet gays.
• Website with minimal features should be available for laptop users. Modern notebooks are location aware.
• A server (web-server) needs to hold the active users coordinates and distribute it to people nearby. A single request saying:
  GET /api/location?user=tapsy&lat=45.1234&long=8.1234
  should set the user as actively searching now (not offline), set users’ coordinates (change as the person is walking) and get the list of nearby users as a response.
• A selection of ‘nearby’ parameter (range in meters) should allow people with cars to scan wider range than people on the wheelchairs.
• Adding people to favorites (use Latitude?).
• The main difference to Latitude is that you’re sharing your location with people you DON’T know and only those which are nearby.
• Setting a ‘nearby’ property to 40000km (or what’s the Earth’s radius) would allow to spy on all users of the app in real-time and should not be possible.
• Allow entering custom incentive text, but insist on selecting from a set of 20-40 predefined ones in order to avoid hard to understand and misunderstood incentives.
• The difference to other dating sites is the location awareness and search based on location in order to find peers in matter of minutes and not weeks.
• Seems like a hot idea, tell me if you like it and would be using it yourself or why not. Vote at: http://goo.gl/mod/aeG