Now several tech startups are trying to increase the odds of connection.

How? By combining intimate knowledge of your comings and goings with understanding of your likes and dislikes – then connecting you with likeminded people and perfect places.

What do they ask in return? For most, an opportunity to push hyper-specific ads or discount offers.

Living in the City

It’s no surprise that New York – densely packed with adventurous souls and endless options – breeds companies trying to connect people and places. “It is about the end experience of being at that bar with your friends and having a good time,” said Dorrie Monglick, one of the young entrepreneurs who debuted at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on the Hudson River last week.

The app Monglick described, SpotOn (currently iPhone-only), was developed at an NYU entrepreneurship class last spring. It works by sucking in location checkins from Foursquare to see where you’ve been (Facebook is coming later). You can rate these venues by clicking up to four petals on a flower (in place of star ratings). Knowing what you like, SpotOn can offer deals, a la Groupon, but tailored to you. It can also take a cut on purchases of event tickets or restaurant reservations, for example.

Your friends see those ratings, and you see theirs. “These are my friends,” said Monglick. “These are not Yelp reviewers that I don’t care about.”

In the future, she said, SpotOn will also simplify group outings – if everyone has the app or at least an active checkin lifestyle. Knowing places each person likes, SpotOn can find those that they have in common, or that are at least likely to please.

What to do?

San Francisco startup Weotta (think “we should”) is entirely for coordinating outings.

After talking to “hundreds of friends and friends of friends,” said co-founder Forrest Wernick, “from their 20s to their 60s, men, women, single, married,” they found two questions common to outings.

The first, “What’s my mood?”, could for example be classy or causal. The second, “Who’s coming with me?” could be a date or a family, both of which I tried for New York City.

For a classy date, it recommended (among others) a singer named Keren Ann at the Bowery Ballroom. I don’t know her, but the clip they sent me to on LastFM was nice. They also recommended two great places for dinner and drinks – except both are actually restaurants.

One of the causal family plans was the Children’s Museum of the Arts, plus lunch and ice cream – except the lunch spot is actually a sweet shop. So not perfect, but not terrible for a service that just started.

For now, all this happens on a Web site, though an app is coming. According to Weotta’s surveys, most people make plans while sitting at work.

To find good venues, Weotta polls review sites like Zagat and OpenTable. According to the company, it can actually “read” the reviews to pick up nuances. To find venues especially for you, it looks at Facebook data such as age, gender and interests. They hope all that info will help in providing discounts and other offers that are likely to please.

Be my friend?

A mobile app called Sonar promises to find new friends for these activities.

Like the others, Sonar mines info posted to social networks, including Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter – looking at both concrete facts, like where you go and who your friends are, as well as analyzing what you say about any topic. Later, said founder Brett Martin, it could pull such info as music tastes from Pandora, food tastes from Foodspotting, and the events selected on ticketing site Eventbrite.

Combine all that with location data, and you could know that next to you is a friend of a friend on Facebook, a history buff, a foodie or anything else that may jibe with your life and personality.

One good thing about Sonar, Martin says, is that other people don’t have to use it in order to be found. It doesn’t rely on what they post to Sonar, but what they post publicly to any of several online networks.

So you could walk up to someone and excitedly introduce yourself, saying you live in the same neighborhood or eat at the same restaurant. And you’ll scare the bejeezus out of them as a likely stalker.

Perhaps better to keep it on the downlow and pretend you just happened to meet them. Even if technology can ensure that serendipity is no longer mere chance, you might want to act as if it were.

[Sean Captain is a strategist for consumer insights firm Iconoculture.]

The DOJ’s reasoning for it is to be able to track the whereabouts of criminals. Obviously, whether law enforcement wants to do this for sanguine reasons or not, it’s likely to ruffle the feathers of privacy advocates — and probably some in Congress.

Minnesota Sen. Al Franken is one of them, and was one of the first to publicly take Apple to task over the issue late last month. In fact, Tuesday’s hearing was Franken’s idea as he chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law.

Will this fly? Probably not. Franken again at the hearing called for regulation on how data is collected as well as disclosure to consumers on how they’re being tracked. There’s little doubt that Franken wouldn’t support efforts by the DOJ or any other government agency for that matter to expand or legalize this type of tracking.

Could there be valid reasons for doing this? Oh, I’m sure of that. But in the end, I don’t see how consumers could get any true promise that their every move isn’t being tracked by Big Brother. These efforts should be approved on a case-by-base basis, not given a blanket approval through legislation.

That’s just asking for trouble in my eyes.

The location services program, which tells friends where you are and finds nearby points of interest, has announced an “Always-On” service that continues to update your whereabouts in the background. Here’s the catch: Loopt itself is free, but Always-On will cost an extra $4 per month on your AT&T bill.

Business Insider’s Dan Frommer writes that Loopt struck a deal with AT&T, allowing the iPhone to beam out its location even though Loopt itself is not actually running. As Daring Fireball’s John Gruber writes, this is a server-to-server system, not an app that functions in the background.

The implications of the deal depend on what’s happening behind the scenes. If AT&T is simply providing a workaround for apps that want to send out information in the background, all this means is that other apps — more location services, mostly — could strike similar deals, as long as the app itself doesn’t need to function at the same time.

But let’s just speculate that AT&T has some sway over the iPhone’s inability to multitask. After all, any application that constantly sends and receives information equates to more strain on AT&T’s already inadequate network, so maybe the no backgrounding rule was a way to cut down on traffic. If that’s the case, we might eventually start seeing real multitasking, on the condition that iPhone users pay an additional charge when there’s a data exchange involved.

Given the uproar that would occur if customers started getting nickled and dimed on more monthly charges, I’m inclined to think deals like the one between Loopt and AT&T will be few and far between. But as much as it would irk me, I’d pay a little extra every month to listen to Slacker Radio while playing games or surfing the ‘net.

Conceptually, Glympse couldn’t be much simpler: The app locates you on a map, then lets you send a message via SMS or e-mail to anyone in your address book, with a brief customizable note from you and a link to an online map showing where the heck you are. You can optionally also mark your destination on the map.

If the people you ping have Glympse installed, he or she can view this “Glympse” of your whereabouts in the app; otherwise, they see it in their browser.

You can also set how long a Glympse of your location is available–from zero seconds (which means the recipient can only see where you were when you sent the Glympse) to four hours (which means that the recipient can keep tabs on your wanderings for that duration). Glympses have no security–the person who receives one can forward it to someone else, who can then peek at your location–but the four-hour maximum ensures that you won’t accidentally let a stalker spy on you forever.

A version of Glympse for Google’s Android OS (ie, the T-Mobile G1) is available now; as you can tell from the screenshots above, the company provided me with early access to an iPhone edition, which is due soon along with ones for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile phones. The service is currently in beta, and shows it: I ran into some glitches such as Glympses which were temporarily unavailable, and one which declared that I was traveling at 23 miles an hour when I was actually lounging around the house. I also  wish that the map that Glympse displays in mobile browsers was zoomed in a bit more, so more street names showed–or, better yet, that the app was able to launch Google Maps on a smartphone, so Glympse recipients could do things with your location such as plot directions from their location to yours. (The version of Glympse for desktop browsers has more features, including zooming and panning and satellite photos.)

Oh, and even though you can customize the SMS or e-mail text you send, you can’t change the subject line of e-mail messages, and the one you get is a tad cryptic for my tastes. The messages I send say “You have been invited to Glympse Harry”–wouldn’t something like “Here’s Harry’s current location, courtesy of Glympse” be clearer?

Glympse isn’t perfect, but it’s a neat idea with plenty of potential. The next time I’m lost and/or late for an appointment, I plan to use it–and  I suspect I won’t have to wait too long until I need it.