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Serendipity
ser?en?dip?i?ty - Pronunciation Key (srn-dp-t)
n. pl. ser?en?dip?i?ties
- The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.
- The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.
- An instance of making such a discovery.
Technology has now made it possible to leave it less to chance in case you’re walking by a compatible mate and you own a cellphone with the right software.
From Eurekalert:
“Fuelling demand for such networking sites is the tendency for young people to stay single for longer and move around more for work. Serendipity, says Eagle, is one of many projects (see “Software gets to the hard truth”) aiming to enhance the technology-mediated socialising services they use, adding a proximity aspect not only to dating but also to friend-finding sites like friendster.com and business networking services such as linkedin.com. Serendipity works out when people are close to each other by harnessing the short-range Bluetooth radio system built into many cellphones. Bluetooth transceivers put each user inside a 10-metre radius “bubble” within which they can connect with similar devices. It is used, for instance, to allow Bluetooth-equipped laptops to connect wirelessly to the internet via a cellphone, or to let a cellphone user buy products from a Bluetooth-enabled vending machine. The Serendipity software needs an always-on - GPRS or 3G - phone and would “sniff” for Bluetooth signals twice a minute. If it finds one, it tells the database, via the net, which phone it has found.
If the users’ profiles match, they will be alerted and can seek each other out. Users would be able to set the degree of personal separation they require from their potential dates, says Eagle. To rule out complete strangers, for instance, users can set their profile so that it is only sent to people who are friends of friends, but no one further removed than that. This is the same type of social vetting offered by friendster.com, tribe.net and Google’s orkut.com. They only let users see profiles within a few degrees of separation, or allow people to set the maximum number of degrees away possible matches can be. The idea is that you are more likely to trust the people your friends already know. But such settings need not be permanent. They might reflect a mood or a situation. If you are out with work colleagues or family, you might not want to know about close matches but may only want to be informed when an unmissable match is in your vicinity.”
Serendipity was created by Nathan Eagle, Pedro Yip, Steve Kannan, and Doochan Han at MIT’s Media Lab in Boston.
[VarChars via Eurekalert]
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