Yahoo! quietly released another mobile application yesterday - this one is a "mobile friend finder" called Checkmates.

It's a way to announce your location via your cellphone and connect to your friends who are nearby. Friends are defined using your Flickr Contacts, so you'll need to hook into a Flickr account for this to work (I'd prefer this to be against my Yahoo! 360 friends - maybe one day Flickr and 360 will merge my contacts?).

The application hooks into maps (I'm not sure if they are live Yahoo! Maps) and you can supply your own files for the mapping.

It should work on all Java phones (Edward Ho mentions it running on his Moto SLVR) - from the FAQ:

"Theoretically, it should work on any Java/MIDP2 CLDC 1.1 capable phone.

Checkmates is known to work on Nokia Series 60 phones like the 6620, 6670, 6680, 6681, 6682, 7610 models, and it is likely to work on 3230, 6630, 6260 as well"

However, the download is a .JAD file that my Moto v551 doesn't like it (Opera Mini, Moto Browser and BT Transfer all fail), any chance of a .JAR file as well that I can transfer? I'd love to give this a try.

It's very cool to see the Yahoo! APIs used on devices that are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and powerful to be able to run these complex applications.

The Checkmates page can be found here, with more information from the developers here, and here.

[Update] I want to thank the Y! devs for helping me with my phone issues, but it turns out the v551 is CLDC 1.0 and so can't install this release. Hopefully, the devs will release a version with slightly fewer constraints (or I just go get a new phone that will work...)