Pinpointing peers

This is new territory for online safety – the technology that allows cellphone users to pinpoint their friends’ physical location with their phones. The only thing that’s regulated about this in the US is the Federal Communications Commission’s 1999 requirement that “cell phone companies implant location-tracking receivers in handsets,” Business Week reports. On the safety and privacy front, “providers of services that help wireless users track friends and loved ones are still finding their footing,” but meanwhile new companies providing all kinds of phone-to-Web media-sharing tools, as well as geolocating social tools for phones keep launching. The Pandora’s Box is now open for business, so watch out, parents. If your kids are telling you “but everybody has Boost,” after you ask them what that is, think out loud together about the implications of ever adding people they don’t know to a friends list that tells them exactly where they are. Meanwhile, here’s Mashable on a new tool called Jaxtr that allows visitors to a MySpace page call the page’s owner on his/her cell. Here’s an early item I wrote on mobile social networking, naming startups like Playtxt, Mamjam, Jambo, Meetro, and Dodgeball (only two of which – Meetro and Dodgeball, owned by Google – appear to have made it to 2007). Sprint’s youth service Boost recently launched with loopt social pinpointing on it, and the Wall Street Journal recently went into some depth on the loopt service.