I had a conversation with a friend the other day about some initiatives they are working on internally. Apparently since Gas prices are so high more people are looking for ways to car pool. In order to help them and of course help the environment they are leveraging community, and social networking to establish car pool groups. I thought it was a great concept. And a great way to capitalize on people who want to establish a social network. Obviously they are going to be using SharePoint to host this, and I thought what a great idea, especially if we could build some cool workflow into it. So here is my process thoughts.

Everyone interested in participating fills out a form. This form collects their basic information such as name, address, phone, etc.

Submitting this form kicks off a workflow that as a first step uses the Windows Live or Google maps API to get and store some coordinates. These can then be stored in the SharePoint site or in a SmartObject. As more and more people submit the form and workflows kick off the same Maps API can be used to calculate distances between people.

Or

You can also establish radius circles around each entered address. Then post that map on the SharePoint site and people can look at other people in those circles. There is a sample in the Google API that would make sense for this called Search Proximity Filtering.

You could probably even automate the workflow even further by having people enter in distance tolerances that they are willing to travel to carpool. Then using something in the process or as part of the event bus has it notify people of matches.

Just thinking off the top of my head here but, with some creative people and some awesome software I think this could be COOL

Looks like there is a good article on how to to this with just http

http://www.webmonkey.com/tutorial/Get_Started_With_the_Yahoo_HTTP_Geocoder_API