MoSoSo

Bunch of ideas coagulating in my head. There are some new ads by a wireless provider which show people with signal meters hovering over their heads. It'd be possible with some not too distant technology to have a visual overlay put on a person with a combination of technology made using GPS, scanned beam displays and something like the technology they're using over at dodgeball.com to create a kind of expression that goes way beyond your standard anti-Bush T-shirt.

Here's the trendy acrony definiton from wired:
MoSoSo
Acronym for mobile social software, a Friendster-like service for cell phones. Coined after the launch of Dodgeball.com, the first MoSoSo provider.

Unfortunately for now the look-at-me-I'm-a-huge-dork factor and price put it out of range but you could for instance have an elphant icon over your head if you were a die hard conservative or maybe a pink flower hovering around you if you were a single girl out on the town. The Hawaiians have something similar if less high tech. "In Hawaii, they say that a woman wearing a hibiscus behind her right ear is single, and a woman wearing a hibiscus behind her left ear symbolizes that she is taken."

Dodgeball.com is a hybrid of Friendster, text messaging and camera phones. The only issue is critical mass which they haven't addressed yet with tools like profile import, etc. I'm going out on a limb and guessing that friendster is going to figure out that they're out of the loop and snatch up the idea if they haven't already. I wonder if it could work using cell triangulation instead of GPS.

Here's an interesting testimonial from their website.
"Tonight night as I came up out of the basement of Lit (around 1:45am), my phone started doing some weird beepy ring I hadn't heard before. "Receiving Picture Message." Picutre Message?!? I was as excited as I was perplexed...who could be sending me a picture messate? While most of my friends have recently purchased phone-cams, so far they're all too numb-skulled to have figured out how to use any of the new features.

I flipped open the phone and it was a notification message from a new application I'd signed up for earlier in the day on dodgeball.com (written by my friend dens). it said "alyssa is at luna lounge. you know her through gregg." and there was a picture of alyssa attached to the message. the only thing more amazing than the fact that there was a pic attached was that alyssa looked super cute! (i tried to curb my excitement because pretty much everyone looks cute in a 100x100 pixel thumbnail).

since luna was only a few block from lit, i decided to stop by and see if i could pick her out in the crowd. i got there to find luna lounge almost empty - so it was easy to spot alyssa at the bar with two friends playing with her phone. i walked up and called her out on her dorkiness: "hey, you're a nerd too, eh?" i showed her my matching phone and we had a laugh. we're SO living in the future."