This got me thinking about the wealth of information that social networks currently hold on a particular user to enable them to fine tune advertising related to them, now if you were able to add the functionality of GPS and the system was able to calculate where the user is, thus when someone is within the vicinity of a shop, (for example borders the book store), using the applications installed on the iphone (such as the facebook app), Borders could potentially advertise to a customer who loves books, has a certain liking for a particular author.  This information can allow the shops to provide an incentive through the social network for the user to come in to the store.

This could potentially have privacy implications, but i’m sure there are ways to make this functionality potentially very friendly both for the consumer and business.

Rather than simply spamming anyone that comes past using bluetooth as has been done in the past, this can be a very targetted means of advertising for the shops for someone who is within easy reach of their store.

It got me thinking of what facebook is missing if it would want to become a more business orientated tool and take away the stigma or merely being just a waste of time and money.  Stats show that millions and millions of business pounds are being spent on wasted time of employees using facebook.  But with the application platform in full swing, surely business can potentially use facebook in a means that is productive.

Merely looking at the Microsoft Exchange suite, you have a setup of email, calendar, contacts, notes, RSS reader.  Considering that business tend to work with systems such as outlook then it got me thinking of how to convert facebook into something that functions with outlook.

Facebook already currently has an events application (calendar), messaging (email), friends (contacts).

With these items and a bit of tweaking I’m sure it could be possible to create an application with the following features:

1. Facebook SMTP – an SMTP server that is able to communicate in the normal ways but given an address of a certain format i.e. friend_name@facebook it would then know to relay the user information through the facebook platform to their facebook inbox.
2. Facebook POP – a rewritien POP server that gets the users messages from facebook and converts them into an email standard to be displayed in any POP email client
3. Facebook IMAP – Potentially one of the hardest, to be able to manage “live” through converting the facebook inbox into an IMAP style editable email box.  But considering POP, the need for IMAP is not necessary unless we can create folders in the inbox and be able to “upload” messages.  This would potentially be a bigger challenge
4. Facebook Contacts – this would use the friends list and be synchronised into your outlook by creating a vCard or something to that extent that can be imported manually, or a client side tool that allows automated synchronisation of the contacts, this would create contact details that are compliant with the Facebook SMTP system
5. Facebook Calendar – Again another means to synchronise your calendar and create events through either a client side plugin into outlook.  Ideally if you can emulate the whole exchange environment to take care of all of this you’d be in on a jackpot (development wide, but you could potentially be broke at the end!)
6. You can add the RSS feed to your Outlook that facebook already provides and now you have the minifeed available within your Outlook environment.

I guess the advantage of this is potentially less spam as the contacts are real and only people you know and know you can communicate with you through this system, it’s a system of trust that facebook has built and would allow for a better email experience overall.  But as facebook has yet to take over the Internet, you would still need to support the old methods thus until facebook is an Internet platform this plan would have to wait!

There could be many reasons for doing this and an advertising model can certinally be possible with textual adverts at the bottom of “emails” sent around, as well as exposure to the system that has been made.

If this was a tool out there would i use it? possibly, it all depends on how well it’s made and how much of my communication occurs with people on facebook, if more work contacts were to breach my rather protected circle of trust in facebook, then this could potentially be a very useful direction for facebook and business 2.0.

This isn’t a serious idea by any means just one of those things to throw out there, i must give credit to ranj for helping inspire it (but that’s probably why it’s a pointless idea….because ranj was involved)!

So today it starts with a GPS SOS Mobile system. The idea is based on a distress call that someone could potentially need to make in an emergency without the ability to pick up the phone and make the call. Thus a predefined button on the phone would be configured that once depressed for a set predefined time would then automatically send an SOS message to a predefined list of contacts. This message will be embedded with the current GPS location of the user at the time of the message. The phone would continue to send out this message at intervals of every few minutes to continue updating the receiver on the current location of the phone/user.

This ideally would have a registration service connected to the police, in which a user would have to pre-register with the police (To avoid pranks from things such as pay as you go phone) which would have a fine attached should the function be misused on purpose. The message when sent to the police would be able to provide them with a distress signal, there could be a small charge placed on registration or the message, which could potentially fund the setup of the system from the police point of view. (The message could potentially be free, but the bill be invoiced – due to the user in need potentially not having any credit(?) )

The pre-requisits would be an SMS enabled phone with a GPS module (becoming more popular in new phones).

This would be an ideal project for someone attempting to create an application for the new Google Android Operating system for mobile devices.

The system could have other uses by having a client-to-client system on such phones, in the ability to embed GPS location in an SMS message to provide instant mapping when the message is received on the other end using software such as TomTom on the device or web based mapping such as Google Maps (also available on Internet based phones).

New Applications for mobiles can have a means of generating income in similar methods that current desktop applications do by attempting to take income through affiliate marketing and cookies with sites that the user visits while browsing the web on their mobile device (as we will eventually see an explosion of such setups in the next few years).