Locaccino is a location-centered social application that was developed in the Mobile Commerce Lab at Carnegie Mellon. The idea behind the application was to allow its users to share their location with friends.
Unlike other services, the technology behind Locaccino allows to easily define the times when the user would like to share her locations together with the possibility to create groups according to location preferences. For example, using these preferences, a user can set permissions to show co-workers her location between 8AM – 5PM.
The system was built for research purposes but after the research team finished the field work the system is still up and available. All you need is to install the Locaccino locator on your mobile phone or laptop and connect to the system page on Facebook. The system uses the friend list on Facebook and allows them to see the broadcasted location.
If you are interested in some academic writing about it check out these research papers:
J. Cranshaw, E. Toch, J. Hong, A. Kittur, and N. Sadeh. Bridging the gap between physical location and onlinesocial networks. In Ubicomp ’10, Pittsburgh, PA, 2010 [PDF]
E. Toch, J. Cranshaw, Hankes-Drielsma P., Tsai J., Kelley P., Cranor L., Hong J. and N. Sadeh. Empirical Models of Privacy in Location Sharing. In Ubicomp ’10, Pittsburgh, PA, 2010 [PDF]