Social Networking Based on Future Location

This presentation talks about the challenge in building a fine-grained model of a person’s future location, and about the range of powerful applications that can be built off such a model. Many applications focus on the current location of a person and their friends – future location is harder to handle but arguably more useful.

Challenges in handling fine-grained future location include the following: - Modeling all the required semantics, including activities which overlap in time, possible or probably activities, alternate plans, linear activities (road trips, train journeys), and more - Achieving good scalability and performance with millions of users - Getting data about future location. Key here is integration with other systems, including calendars, travel, restaurant reservation, invitation and ticket booking systems - Deciding what is “interesting” in terms of interaction with friends. This is relatively easy when far from home but more complex when close to home

These issues will be discussed based on our experience of developing a live system based on PostGIS, Google Maps, Java and JavaScript (with ExtJS).