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Commuting to and from work in the Washington, DC metro area where I live is a full-contact sport.  Regularly Washington is near the top of the list of America’s cities with the worst traffic, and deservedly so.  For Washingtonians traffic has disproportional influence on our lives, and the locals have developed some very innovative mechanisms to cope with traffic.

I was excited to see the Carticipate application on the iTunes Application Store.  Carticipate is a social networking tool to find carpool buddies.  I was very impressed by this real-world application of social networking.  There’s also a Carticpate application coming to Facebook.  The value of Carticipate obviosly increases as mor eusers come on board.  One complaint about carpooling is that it does not offer carpoolers flexibility for things like errands, after work happy hours and trips to the gym before and after work.  With a large enough social network a Carticipate user would be more likely to have a friend going from most points A to most points B at various times of day.  One might even be able to coordinate “transfers” among multiple carpooling buddies so that Bob rides with Carol from Washington to Tysons Corner and then catches a ride with Ted and Alice from Tysons Corner to Ashburn.

That, and I think the concept is just really neat.