Our experiences of the Internet and of physical places in the city are changing radically as people use digital networked technology more and more beyond the desktop, and as Internet services become more aware of the places we use them in. Today's internet software increasingly takes advantage of ever-more-organized location- specific data to provide increasingly richer "local" experiences.

Having launched Meetro and in doing so created active and growing local communities in several cities, Paul Bragiel and Vincent Lauria have learned a lot that they'd like to share with the community at ETech. Sean Savage of Placesite will also join in to discuss his company's very different but complementary approach to the location aware internet.

We'll compare these different approaches, examine the challenges faced & explain the biggest lessons we've learned in the field. Topics will include:

• Privacy and the abstraction of physical location in Location Based Services (LBS): radius-based systems which avoid revealing specific locations.
• Contact mutuality vs. non-mutuality: solutions in an evolving social ecosystem where one cannot simultaneously see more than an assigned number of users.
• What to do when someone's not there: rethinking the way we deal with online/offline status.
• What we can learn from two models of the location-aware Web: services tied to the place, and services tied to the person.