People Search Digest

In today’s society people value their “personal space.” This “space” can be defined as anywhere from five inches to five yards to five miles - depending on the person. Capitalizing on this tendency is Meetro, a proximity-based instant message service that works towards closing the gaps among people within the same area. Meetro is a free-to-download instant messaging client, as well as a real time social networking application that is uniquely location aware. It works by detecting a user’s own physical location and then tracks other users who are nearby. It is a completely safe service because it only displays a user’s radial distance, and never his or her exact address or location. Conveniently, Meetro is compatible for both Mac and PC users, and supports AIM, MSN, ICQ, and Yahoo IM so a user can combine buddies from different clients into one singular platform. With all the nifty instant messaging features, it’s easy to forget Meetro is a social network too, which allows you to create a personal profile just like Facebook or MySpace.

The only drawback to Meetro is its current lack of user critical mass, and an overall lack of buzz about where the company is going. Of course, this all may be about to change. There is a rumor going around that the Meetro team has quietly been building a new product - and easy “one-click” way of creating a new forum on the fly. Instant messaging and forums are very similar except for the fact that instant messaging is synchronous (occurring at the same time), and forums are asynchronous (does not require a common clock between communication devices). With Meetro’s special expertise, this new forum product could prove to be a very interesting addition to ever-widening world of social search.