What a strange title; people probably don't associate Big Blue with socializing. Anyhow, you might have heard about IBM's new Alphaworks technology, Socializer. If you haven't, consider yourself clued in as of right now. According to IBM, "Socializer is a distributed, peer-to-peer platform that connects a person to people and services in the same location. " Sounds kind of like a higher-level version of Apple's Rendezvous technology for device discovery.
They are looking for people to come up with applications. The killer app, I think, would be proximal profile discovery via Bluetooth cellphones. Bluetooth is short range, so maybe GPS-based cellphones could interact with a server to find one another, but that isn't P2P anymore so we'd need something other than Socializer to do the job. But imagine walking down the street and being alerted whenever another Galactic fan comes within range. If a bunch of people running the client on their phone are within range of one another, the network would extend for as far as the chain remains unbroken, kind of like the Cybiko, or even packet radio. Once widespread adoption is sufficient, entire communities or even cities could be bathed in the P2P social grid.
And cellphones would only be part of the vision- IBM intends this to be used on laptops and Palm devices. I imagine that this could be used between wireless base stations as well, or even over cable modem where all users on the street are essentially on a LAN. Community bulletin boards could spring up, giving rise to BBS-like social enclaves (which were often geographically constrained due to long distance bills) where people would meet IRL as a group like way back in the day.
We're already seeing WiFi communities develop - another trend is grid computing over the network - and the explosive popularity of P2P in general. Clearly the Internet is headed for a whole new era of applications, and in the original spirit of innovation, hopefully cooperative communities will drive the development.
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