Here's a timely project: With thousands of people returning home to the Seattle region this weekend through SeaTac Airport, friends Ben Eidelson and Jason Prado of Seattle have rolled out a new, free service called ridepenguin. It aims to match people who are headed home from the airport to the same neighborhoods -- or at least on similar routes -- letting them split a cab and save money by sharing the fare.

The service is exclusive to our region for now, but if it works they're thinking of expanding to other airports in the future. Of course, services like this are more useful when more people are using them, so let's experiment and see if we can get a bunch of TechFlash readers to give it a try this weekend. If you do, please post in the comments to let us know about the experience, and whether or not it worked for you.

One cautionary note: ridepenguin gives other users (i.e., strangers looking to split a cab) your phone number after you're matched up for a ride, so you can connect. If you're squeamish about such things, take that into consideration. Eidelson said he and Prado discussed whether that was the right approach as they were developing the service. They'd like to hear feedback on that and other features.

The ridepenguin service works by letting users submit a neighborhood or city as a destination, and an approximate time that they want to leave the airport. As a bonus, it then calculates the mileage for the trip, and the potential savings in cab fare and CO2 as a result of sharing the ride. Potential rideshares then show up in a list where users can see and "claim" rides, and then get in touch with each other at the airport.

Ridepenguin is one of several projects developed by Prado, 24, and Eidelson, 21, under the umbrella of EverythingIsTheBest, including one to help roommates split purchases and another to help people have online conversations. Prado and Eidelson are friends from Stanford, where they were in the computer science and electrical engineering programs, respectively. Eidelson's day job (unaffiliated with these side projects) is working as a full-time researcher in Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group. Prado, previously a software development engineer on the Microsoft Silverlight team, is now full-time on these projects.

Their plan is to prototype and release a number of projects, without spending more than a few weeks of initial development on any of them, and see how each does before deciding which to develop further. The projects tend to address problems or opportunities that Eidelson and Prado have encountered in their lives.

Ridepenguin had been further down on the list, but they realized it would be particularly good to have it online for holiday travelers.

"We started planning and coding two weeks ago, and now have the first version out for Seattle," Eidelson says via email. "If the project takes off and proves to be useful, we are interested in building a business around it. At this point though, we are most interested to see how people use it and how we can help them out."