Sixsense - locate friends around you

By Vivek Puri | October 11th, 2006 at 11:00 am ET         

Sixsense is a cool new Firefox extension that finds people around you, locates your buddies, and creates communities through localized bulletin boards. Sixsense works on enabling users to be able to locate friends in their vicinity. The service is targeted more towards students in universities who typically own laptops and have easy access to wifi hotspots. Besides using the wifi to detect user location, Sixsense can also use bluetooth connection to detect friends near you. 

To get started you and your friends need to register with Sixsense and install the Firefox extension from Sixsense. After that whenever you near a wifi hotspot, Sixsense toolbar will blink to indicate all the friends that are around you. The range within which Sixsense can detect your friends will depend on the area covered by the wifi connection. In case your friends are not in your wifi connection range, you can add them to your ‘Buddy List’. From there on, whenever they access internet through a wifi connection, their location will get updated in the Sixsense toolbar. Apart from this, if you already are deep down into Facebook or Myspace, Sixsense can automatically forward part of your profile to your Facebook or MySpace link.

However the users will have to work with the Sixsense service initially to name their wifi locations. Whenever a user tries to locate friends using Sixsense, it determines the user location using the IP address and few other parameters. If someone had previously given a name to the location everything is good to go. Otherwise you will have to name the location like ‘College Ave’, which will now act as an bulletin board for that location.

Sixsense started off as an mobile app but later on moved over to web-based area. Sixsense team is not really looking to jump into the IM market. They just want to serve as a complimentary but useful service to social networks. In future Sixsense will be looking to introduce IE Sixsense toolbar, Google Maps mashup, and widgets for MySpace et al.

Currently Sixsense in beta stage but you can register from the backdoor page located here.

Links:
Sixsense

Tags: StartupSquad - SocialNetworking - Presence