WiFi and generalized laptop ownership are making life on the MIT campus increasingly mobile. Untethered from Ethernet cables, students, faculty and staff can spend longer hours away from their offices and workstations. Cafe, lounges - sometimes just a lawn under a tree or an old staircase facing the Charles River - are becoming normal working places.

In such an environment, new issues emerge: how to easily keep track of your friends' movements? How to schedule an appointment with your professors and fellows in real time? How to increase chances of casual encounters with similar people around you?

iFIND, a project developed at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, aims to improve social networking through some kind of digitally augmented serendipity. Using iFIND, you and your buddies can instantaneously exchange your locations on campus, talk to users nearby, and microcoordinate more effectively. If you are a geek, you will even be able to arrange meetings in real time using the group's center of gravity!

iFIND aims to give full control of location to the users. It is you who can choose, on a peer to peer basis, when to disclose your individual data and to whom.

To start using iFIND, click on "downloads" to the left. iFIND operates on the Java platform.

Are you a Java guru interested in working on a killer app? Send us an email at senseable-ifind (all addresses @mit.edu)