While I was chatting with Andre and Doc today, Andre mentioned something that I liked: a personal area network. Your personal area network is the group of folks in your buddy list. This is an incredible resource that no one has really tapped. People who use instant messaging have taken the time to indicate the people that they consider their friends and right now all its used for is chatting and presence. There's got to be other things that we could do with it. This comment happened in the context of a larger conversation with Simon Grice, the founder of Midentity. Midentity is pretty cool little application that is integrating lots of connectivity and identity information into a single pane. I called it a "personal identity management" tool and that seemed to resonate with Simon, Doc, and Andre.

Simon is doing something in England that uses SMS enabled phones to create community groups that people can use for neighborhood watch and similar purposes. I liked the idea a lot.