I first thought of this concept when I was doing my MBA (around 4 to 5 years back). It was always thing of “what would happen if I could create a social network for mobile phones”? This is not like Facebook for mobile or Twittering through a mobile phone. The main difference would be that it would be:

1. Incredibly location-specific: In telecom terminology, it would be at a cell-level or a site-level grouping

2. Incredibly purpose-specific: That is, it would create links between people who have similar attributes.

The first point is simple. If someone in my friends’ network is at Worli Seaface and so am I (on the other end), we both would get an intimation about the other’s presence. Once we both agree to link up, a chat window would open wherein we could figure out where to meet and even whether to meet right now.

The second point would be the killer: Imagine two people (strangers to each other) at the same place (Bandstand if you must), one is a VC and the other is an entrepreneur seeking VC capital. If the VC is “looking” for entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurs is “searching” for VCs, the social networking platform would consider these two people invitations to link/meet up. Maybe, once the requests are approved, the VC gets access to the entrepreneurs’ profile to see what the company is about and then chat with him on that.

A few salient points:

1. Intimation without confirmation: It should never be clear to one of the parties whether the other party is ignoring the invite or does not know about it. This is because, if I know that you received an intimation that I am around and you don’t want to connect, I may feel insulted. Hence, there needs to be a distinction between logging on to the network and receiving intimations

2. Ability to turn-off the intimations at any time: Personalization extreme. I choose on which communities (in the above example, the VC would belong to a community of VCs investing in startups and the entrepreneur in a community which seeks VCs) I want to receive intimations from and which I don’t

3. Maybe increase or decrease the range of search for other people

4. Add-ons – Whether I can add testimonials, comments, blog urls, my feeds, etc.

Loopt does that to a significant extent except that it links people based on friends’ networks and tags but neglecting to integrate community and purpose. From their site:

Loopt shows users where friends are located and what they are doing via detailed, interactive maps on their mobile phones. Loopt helps friends connect on the fly and navigate their social lives by orienting them to people, places and events. Users can also share location updates, geo-tagged photos and comments with friends in their mobile address book or on online social networks, communities and blogs. Loopt was designed with user privacy at its core and offers a variety of effective and intuitive privacy controls.

A similar kind of mobile community here: New Loopt App Helps You With Random Hookups … Now

While the concept is the same, the objective is different. Maybe .