Why context-aware social networking is the future
Most of us rely on popular social media platforms for our social connectivity and well-being.
These platforms do a great job in connecting us with our friends, relatives, and acquaintances. In fact, the level of connectivity they provide is so high that many of us unknowingly attain a level of hyper-connectivity that blinds us from interacting with everyone else who's not already in our social network.
People in our immediate surroundings share common experiences with us. Whether its those that are waiting for the same train as you, the thousands of fellow spectators that are watching the same football game at a stadium with you, or everyone staying in the same hotel as you — you have more in common, and thus more reasons to interact, with people in your immediate vicinity than you realize. Unfortunately, most of these people are not already in your social network and therefore, opportunities to interact with them are usually lost.
Social media platforms must evolve to become context-aware. Letting you interact with people sharing common experiences near your current physical location is one form of context-aware social networking.
Locye (www.locye.com), a social media platform that formally launched at last week's LaunchCMU — an event showcasing Carnegie Mellon University startups — held at the Oracle Conference Center, offers just that. It lets you post content that's visible to people near your current physical location and see posts made by others near you. You can post anonymously or with your identity as well as like, dislike, comment, and report posts. It also gives you the option of posting your content forever or having it disappear after a day.
Locye goes a step further by letting users observe social activity at real-time hotspots and places of interest worldwide. It computes hotspots by scanning the entire planet once every couple of minutes and applying artificial intelligence to identify areas that are likely to contain newsworthy content minus the typical chatter that accompanies trending hashtags.
