One problem with wireless adhocery is of course knowing what’s around you. Warchalking and netstumbling are I guess fun if you are that way inclined, but apart from anything else, generate a network snapshot rather than being a real-time service: what’s the average halflife of availability of a particular open WiFi access point? Maps decay.

Personal Area Networking is even more sensitive to aging of data. There’s no point my pocket device knowing who had bluetooth active within range a week ago. An alternative to maps is of course always-on search and notification. The problem with current pocket devices is that they don’t have battery life sufficient for us to be that profligate with power, or the ability to hibernate with networking alone active. Which is a shame: personal area p2p (intimate networking) shouldn’t have to wait for fuel-cell charged PDAs.

But Bluetoooth is low power, and the chips are cheap. How about a TINY bluetooth object, no display, no interface, which just lights up, chirps or vibrates when it detects an open bluetooth device proximate, alerting you that it might be worth powering on your more power-hungry kit?

Or failing that, given that the BT implementations in recent mobile phones (such as my Ericsson T68i) seem capable of being always-on while still allowing battery life of a couple of days, how about someone writing a smartphone app that’s the Bluetooth equivalent of Netstumbler — when it detects an interesting nearby service, it can pop up a messge on the handset similar to an SMS message notification?