Sonar - Project Draft
Contents
Definition
FreeSonar is a mobile free software for real-time location-based socializing, sharing PoI, self-organizing and sharing events, travelling, ride sharing and other features.
FreeSonar helps to link the virtual world of social network users into real world around them, encourageing to interact in real time at real places based on shared interests or shared activities.
FreeSonar is designed to be interoperable with other similar open services and applications carefully considers users freedom, privacy and security providing them maximal control of their visibility, ownership of their personal data and independence from proprietary services.
Description
FreeSonar has a goal to provide federated, secure and free web services using open standards and protocols. In practice, using their mobile phones on the go or desktop PCs, users will be able to do the following:
- find and socialize with people in their near proximity. Find each other by location, interest keyword or other criteria and safely communicate. The Sonar provides free and secure social networking/microblogging/geo-locating tools via its own free web services or wherever it is possible via decentrilzed and federated web services.
- self-organize activity or an event. Users can publish real-time information about their current activity in their current location, initiate new activities, organize events or look for real-time events happening around them, or publish a demand for a specific type of event in a given area.
- ride sharing. If a user is driving somewhere with his personal car and is willing to share available free seats, the Sonar can assist in real time to find other people going in the same direction and offer to share the ride (and the other way around - to assist hitch-hikers to find a ride).
- travel sharing. Users can finding travellers in their neighborhood, share their ongoing or future travel plans, organize or join to a trip and later share the experiences.
- couch sharing. Users who have available living space for a short time stay can offer their "couch" to travelers. Travelers can search for places available to stay around them (sharing here is not for money like in guest houses but motivated by cultural exchange. e.g. http://www.couchsurfing.org).
Features
Simple user interface
- Almost invisible user interface, intuitive, minimalistic.
- Visualization of the geo-radar.
- "one-click" for main actions, maximum "three-clicks" for anything else.
Social networking/microblogging
- Decentralized authentication.
- Personal profiles.
- Friends list/groups.
- Private messaging.
- Wall posts, microblogs.
- Profile search by name/location/keyword/etc.
Event/activity sharing
- Organize events or activities: party, training, exhibition, festival, etc.
- Publish event demands.
- Join/subscribe to public events.
- Search events by title/keyword/status/location/time.
- etc.
Travel/transport sharing
- let hitch-hikers know that there are available car sits from location A to B (real-time or at the specified date).
- let drivers know that you need to go from location A to B (real-time or at the specified date).
- share travel plans.
- share travel experiences, read/publish into geocoded wiki articles. The Wikitravel project is of special interest:
- Wikitravel - Wikitravel is a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable worldwide travel guide. So far it has 24,445 destination guides and other articles written and edited by Wikitravellers from around the globe.
Location sharing, real-time map and AR objects
- Display current location on a map (if enabled by user's privacy options).
- Publish/search places of interest: coffee houses, hotels, accommodation rentals, etc.
- Publish geonotes: users can leave a note at a specific location for themselves or other people which they will receive next time being there.
- Manual user checkins into the places and defined areas on the map.
Location triggers
- Automatic location trigger to check-in the user into user's predefined list of areas/places.
- Automatic triggering of a specified callback URL when user enters or leaves a specific location.
- Automatic check-ins on other geo-social platforms using open APIs (Foursquare, Facebook Places, Latitude, etc).
Radar with alerts/proximity notifications
To eliminate the necessity to query for a specific real-time object repeatedly users can place alerts or subscribe to proximity notifications for the following:
- If there are people matching specific search criteria in near proximity.
- If there are places-of-interest matching the given search keyword/tag.
- If there is a car with free space/hitch-hiker going to a given destination.
- If there are other travel plans match the given destinations/activities/interests.
- If there are non-private events matching the given keywords/tags/dates/location/status/etc.
Open APIs
- Provide open access APIs and web services.
Architecture
P2P social network platform
There are already several protocols and free software implementations for federated/decentralized/P2P social networking and micro-blogging platforms and Sonar intends to integrate the existing best practises.
But there no solutions yet for having distributed/P2P real-time maps and location sharing services without the use of centralized web services. So for the current stage project Sonar will have to provide some non distributable central web services as well.
Real-time geo-map
Sonar has to provide real-time map of:
User locations: GPS-enabled mobile phones which are connected to the internet will send data to the server at regular intervals. If there is no GPS the location data can be calculated from wifi spots and cell towers with sufficient approximation.
Event locations: events happening at a specified time span at a specified location.
Places-of-interest: places named by users not as street addresses but locations like "Home", "Dood's Club" etc.
Augmented reality layers
Sonar has to provide map layers of AR objects, and aggregate other 3-th party AR layers into the map (Google Maps and Layar provide web services and open APIs to access their user contributed database of places-of-interest on different layers).
Promotion Plan
- Build testbeds to demonstrate the software on one or more usage areas.
- For the start find one specific niche, a community and offer the new networking opportunity to them creating their unique social graph.
- Offer collaboration to mobile operator companies. If possible use the contact list of user's mobile phone, identify the numbers via the mobile service provider and use the social graph of the mobile users as a kick-start for our social network.
- Offer solutions to universities and start networking the students.
Evaluation
The mobile phone will soon become the most powerful channel for persuasion, more influential than TV, radio, print, or the Internet. Mobile devices can be designed to motivate and influence people, this emerging trend will change the way we live, work, communicate and play.
GIA announces the release of a comprehensive global report on Mobile Software market. The global market for mobile software is projected to reach $79.7 billion by 2017, primarily driven by rapid proliferation of mobile computing devices, and waxing popularity of location-based services. Source: San Jose, CA (Vocus/PRWEB) April 18, 2011
Quid software creates multi-dimensional industry maps (like the one the right) which represents 4,000 technology enterprises from venture-backed start-ups to established public companies that received media coverage and showed capital growth last year. Such maps expose relationships between and across sectors and, even more tantalizing, the white spaces among them. They reveal not only which sectors are thick with competition but where in the market white spaces are open for the innovation with new products and services no one has even dreamed up yet. Here in this capture on the right we can notice the apparent white space in between the sectors NETWORKS, TRAVEL, EDUCATION, SOCIAL MEDIA, E-COMMERCE where the new sector GEOLOCATION is starting to form.
Report from Juniper Research says that the number of subscribers using mobile Internet services will rise from 577 million currently, to top 1.7 billion by 2013, spurred by demand for collaborative applications known collectively as 'web 2.0,' and greater 2.5/3G penetration. Putting that figure into some context, a report from Gartner had said that the worldwide PC base would reach 2 billion by 2014 - so internet access by mobile phones will represent at around 50% of the total internet usage. Source: Cellular News.
Related Endeavors
License
Sonar is a free software application developing by the community efforts for the community. It is available under GNU AGPL License.
- GNU AGPL - The GNU Affero General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works, specifically designed to ensure cooperation with the community in the case of network server software.
