Finding "people like you near you" at MindTrek

I'm starting to have fun playing around with our alpha app, Cluetail Lunch Date at http://lunchdate.cluetail.com.

I can see the list of "people like me near me" growing from week to week. Apparently now, there are already 7 (!) Twitterers in Mikkeli :-)

We thought it would be nice to run Cluetail Lunch Date as a gimmick during the MindTrek conference in Tampere next week - and at the pre-conference workshop in Helsinki.

Anyone can try it out by submitting their Twitter name and (optionally, for better results) Delicious account name. The service will return a list of Twitterers at "lunchdate distance".

The list is sorted by relevance, so that the person with whom you have most in common (based on your Twitter messages and Delicious bookmarks) ranks at the top.

We hope to be able to provide some "common topics" for you and your lunch date as well. Perhaps a kind of tag cloud or some such. But let's see if we'll make it in time. And of course we also hope to add-on other feeds from social web services, in order to generate more relevant results.

The bigger idea around the lunch date app is to illustrate how we think our recommendation engine can help people find "relevant strangers" (or sometimes not-so-strangers) online, as well as relevant conversations and information.

After you've used the app once, we'll send you more details via Twitter, so that you can sign up and create a profile if you like - which should improve the relevance of your Lunch Date results over time.

Anyway, back to MindTrek. Any clever ideas on how we can make it as easy as possible for peope to try this out?

We were thinking of handing out business cards with screen shots of Cluetail Lunch Date on a mobile phone browser. A picture more telling than a thousand words and all that.

Hey, feel free to try this thing out at http://lunchdate.cluetail.com. Let us know what you think either in the comments here below, or email me at <jos.schuurmans[at]cluetail.com>. Or find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/josschuurmans.