Likeourselves.com is a brand new smartphone app which gives you the power to read people’s minds as you walk around doing your stuff. OK, so maybe not exactly, but kinda.

The idea is you sign up to the free service, enter in your interests, and then fire up the mobile app on your phone. As you walk around, the application locates other members and checks out their interests, and if you both match and allow a connection, it helps you meet each other.

There’s a number of cool things about this app. First, it ties in with locations nicely. So if you have, say, put in Jazz Music as one of your likes, or have specified that you’re a journalist, the app will scan nearby locations to you and highlight any jazz lovers and/or journos in the area, so you can shuffle over and introduce yourself if you feel lonely.

You’ll also get to see how many Likeourselves members are in the various locations around you, so you can pick which one to head towards to be sociable. The whole thing may sound like a saddo tool, or something the stalkers will love, but with the right kind of demographic takeup it could be a very interesting service indeed.

Of course, the first uses will inevitably involve Craigslist type encounters, but there’s no reason why people who are members of various online communities (e.g. Meetup.com, Reddit or Metafilter etc) couldn’t also use it to facilitate ‘meat-space’ encounters while out and about. I’d happily set mine to some of my more enjoyable online groups, to see if there were interesting people with my kind of psyche around and about.

One of the most popular groups on there at the moment is ‘flatmate seekers’, which indicates it could be very useful for finding people to share house with, perfect for the big city, right?

In fact the guys have already set up a Red Ferret group, so I’ll be watching out for anyone with that tagged on their phone (hi Gran!) just for fun. The whole thing is in pre-beta at the moment, so there are very few people signed up, but the developers are just about to start a push to promote free signups, and start the ball rolling in earnest.

Despite the fact it’s very early days (you can’t create your own groups yet for instance) it’s a really nice application, and well designed too, which makes it great to use. The developers are all young bootstrappers, so there’s no VC money polluting the vision yet, and I hope it succeeds. Nice one guys.