Get together for dinner eh? More like checking to see if she's shagging your mate! A privacy advocate's worst nightmare, but it's opt in right?

This is really useful, there is a certain case in my country where the mobile phone was stolen. Good thing the mobile carrier has a gps system that was activated. The phone was recovered and the muggers are arrested.

I think this idea has some merit - linking GPS to existing social networks. How would it make money though?

Please expand :-)

I had a similar idea, but for any combination of GPS device and internet accessable device.

In terms of how it would make money, charge people to have the plugin on their sites.

RE: Adian. The business model is dead simple. Non-paying members can only monitor up to 5 users' locations*, anything above that requires a paid subscription, with the subscription premium scaled to the number of users that member is allowed to monitor. What this will do is let personal users get in free and spread the service far and wide, while charging a nice premium for corporate/enterprise users who want to monitor their sales or delivery networks. Another revenue stream that will naturally arise will come from creating custom solutions for large enterprises that outgrow the basic service.

In simple terms: its free to signup and publish your location to as many people who you authorize and who choose to subscribe to it. But if you want to subscribe to other people's locations, (perhaps while publishing your own, or perhaps not), you can only subscribe to the location of up to 5 people without paying, and after that you have to pay a subscription premium.

*As stated, MemberA can only subscribe to MemberB's location if MemberB explicitly allowed MemberA, or allowed a social network in which MemberA belongs.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to have fine-grained location-based social network? This is one of the hottest prospects, let there be no doubt. The think missing of course are GPS enabled GSM phones. And then some time for them to become widespread. There are few models coming out soon though, aren't they?

This has been done by quite a few entrepreneurs, http://mologogo.com just did it but I dont think they're able to sell it to the giants. The thing is such ideas have to go through current social networks, and it is a feature that you can't build a business model around, it's really up to the social network on wether they want to buy this idea, and given that it's implemented, it doesn't look like they're willing to do it yet. Probably because not enough GPS functionality software platform is available on cell phones. With time this will be executed. I had an idea to get a patent on this stuff, but unfortunately looks like it has been done, so probably patented. I am quite open to socializing with people who have interest in the field that have other ideas or business in the field. So talk to me igor.raskin@gmail.com