• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Where Are Your Facebook Friends? New Plan May Help Find Them

Posted on: Saturday, 10 May 2008, 15:00 CDT

By MARINO ECCHER

With the ranks of online social networking sites burgeoning, Charles Xie thinks it's getting too hard to pick out new friends in the crowd.

His entry in the Governor's Business Plan Contest -- a location- based matching service called GeoNet -- aims to help them cut through the clutter.

"MySpace has 120 million people in its network," said Xie, 29. "It's hard to find people who have the same interests as you. It's very tedious work."

According to Xie's business plan, GeoNet would use algorithms to mine data from sites such as MySpace and Facebook to identify potential friends. It would cater to users who access those sites from their mobile phones, taking a user's location into account when searching for matches.

As Xie envisions it, the technology would allow two people with common interests who are geographically close or plan to attend the same event -- a concert, for instance -- to connect.

"It's kind of a search engine," he said. "It's to help you search for your potential friends."

Users would download software from the company for free on their mobile phones. Social networking sites would pay for GeoNet's services, presumably in a bid to draw more sets of eyes to offer advertisers.

Mobile social networking will become a $6 billion market by 2012, according to industry data Xie used to support his business plan. Juniper Research predicts the number of social networking users will rise to nearly 600 million in 2012 from 14 million last year.

Xie's plan is one of 20 finalists in the business plan contest, selected from an initial pool of more than 250 entries.

A doctoral student in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Xie came up with the idea for the company in November.

He said he was inspired by the rise of software development kits for mobile phones, and saw an opportunity to take advantage of the growing number of people who access social networking sites from mobile phones.

Since then, he and a handful of other students and faculty members have developed programs to implement the concept on mobile phones.

The group took second place in a programming contest on Madison's campus in December, which Xie said convinced him that the idea was viable.

Two undergraduate students are working on the project along with Xie, along with a Microsoft software engineer and a few professors who serve as advisers.

The group is soliciting funding from investors, and hopes to launch the company this fall, starting in Madison and targeting the 18- to 25-year-old demographic that is the backbone of the social networking industry.

Emphasis on privacy

To alleviate concerns that the service might transmit too much personal information about its users, the company will put special emphasis on privacy controls, Xie said.

Data on location and personal interests would be used only as part of the search algorithm -- not archived or stored.

Users would be able to specify how much personal information they want revealed in searches.

"We don't collect any information," he said. "We don't track people."

Xie, originally from China, has been in the United States for three years.

He previously launched an online service in Atlanta to help people learn English as a second language, but abandoned that venture when he came to Madison to pursue his doctorate.

Xie said GeoNet won't be limited to MySpace and Facebook, but instead will be designed to work with any social networking service.

He said he believes mobile access eventually will become the medium of choice for social networking -- simply because "you don't always have your computer with you."

Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

More News in this Category