Can you wish for a mobile MyBlogLog deployment?

A post from Jake Kuramoto triggered a reminder in my brain. Jake was thinking about location-based services, which reminded me of some experiments that MyBlogLog conducted at various big events a few months ago. As Marshall Kirkpatrick explained on March 3:

Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog is stepping into dangerous waters with a new experiment in mobile presence tracking through Bluetooth.

Demonstrated at the eTech conference today, m.mybloglog.com says it allows users to: "Bind your Bluetooth address to your MyBlogLog account and discover others nearby and [sic] find out if you have any shared interests. Meetspace keeps track of time spent with others so you have a running log of people to meet and things to talk about."

The new Mobile MyBloglog uses a java applet to tie your Bluetooth device to your MyBlogLog account, then polls for new activity every two minutes.

As Ian Kennedy explained in a comment:

[T]his is an opt-in experience that we threw together as an social experiment for the crowd at the Graphing Social Patterns, ETech, and upcoming SxSW conferences for feedback.

The reactions have been positive but certainly eye-opening as well.

On TechCrunch, Mark Hendrickson subsequently noted that

This service obviously works best when you have a group of geeks huddling around the same areas, such as conference halls.

Now when I go to conferences, I normally don't go to geek conferences. (The conference that I'm at this week is a conference of cops, not geeks.)

But there's one exception to my conference attending activities - the very geeky Oracle OpenWorld. I don't know how many people will be there this year, but when you add all the ex-BEA folks, you're going to have tens upon tens of thousands within a few blocks of the Moscone Center.

I'm not sure if Ian Kennedy is still conducting these mobile MyBlogLog experiments, but if he's looking for a site with tens of thousands of geeks, Oracle OpenWorld 2008 may be his opportunity. And heck, it's in San Francisco - you wouldn't even have to travel.

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