Say you are walking around the mall in a wireless hotspot area and you see a hot person walking towards you. You wonder - does she iFob? Huh? What the hell is that? It is what looks to be an interesting new way for daring iPhone users to meet one another in passing.
iFob is developed and distributed by a company called iCloseBy. The iFob application, which the company says is available for free download to iPhones and iPod touches, stays in a constant search mode for other iFob-enabled devices. When it finds one the two devices "light up" and automatically exchange what iCloseBy calls "micro profiles" of information about their owners.
iCloseBy said the iFob application can be set in modes to guard privacy while still seeing if other iFob users are in the area. There’s no login or Web registration so one can change information as much as desired. It seems like an interesting idea - have you be iFobbed yet?
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February 8th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
this ifob thing is only for iphone and ipod touch that have jailbrake, if you didn’t jailbrake your iphone, you can’t download and install it. plus this is sad for all those loners out there. lol
June 27th, 2008 at 5:50 am
Well, though iFob is a nice idea it mainly lacks some features I’d like to see, portability and openess.
Some features I would like to see are filetransfer, voicechatting and gps-support (via triangulation on iPhone) on a more global scale (imagine you met the hot chick mentioned in the above article and now you want to keep in touch with her?).
Portability because there is no linux-client avaible (not even a binary one) and the Windowsclient refuses to run under wine. This is a problem as more and more users start to use Linux (esp. Ubuntu) as a free and stable alternative to Windows.
Openess would circumvent many of those problems. If the protocol (or better, the whole program) would be open it could be modified by anyone to fit his needs and the whole open source community could help develop a richer user experience.
As a longterm solution for close by social networking XMPP/Jabber could be used (esp. considering the development of metropolitan area networks)
It supports all features important to instantmessaging and much more (complete list http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/).
The only thing missing would be a local user discovery independent of the central servers.
Because I like the idea behind iFobs I think I’m going to write an extension proposal and send it to the XMPP Standards Foundation (I’m studying computer science with focus on mobile and distributed systems, so I think I can create a usefull approach to the problem).
Archimedes
July 11th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
iFob indeed lets users see each other when they are nearby. However, it is limited by the range of WiFi. There are similar applications such as zintin (http://www.zintin.com) which are not limited to that range.