What if… your social network was not defined by your on-line activity, but was generated from the people you meet daily, taking into account how regularly you meet, the time of day, location and duration.
As surprising as it sounds the technology for a network of this type exists today, not in some shady lab run by Google, Facebook or even Microsoft, but in our pockets.
Recently I toyed a little with the Facebook Open Graph, and since then I have been considering how these Object ID’s map to the real world. Everything in the Open Graph is an object in the software development sense and Object ID’s are used to represent individual people, businesses, events, places and activities.
So how can we exchange these ID’s quickly and invisibly?
A number of methods exist today to integrate this functionality into say the Android or iPhone Facebook applications. For example a handset could broadcast a Wi-Fi SSID of “FB-ID:XXXXXXXX” where X’s would represent the users Facebook Object ID. Bluetooth radios could also be utilised to transmit and receive this information, offering an advantage of a shorter range (10m or so) enabling the software to understand that this person was in close physical proximity.
Concurrently, your device on say a thirty-second interval could perform a scan looking for other devices broadcasting an SSID with a “FB-ID:” prefix. With this data the software can trivially discover if the detected Object ID’s around you resolve to existing Facebook friends. If they turnout to be valid object references then record the duration, the location (from GPS) and time of the meeting, and if the Object ID’s dont match existing friends store them for later analysis.
We can build systems that can dynamically partition these aquantances into categories like close friends, co-workers, business contacts and others. And importantly, manage how these relationships change over time representing your current real life social network.
Whether or not current wireless technologies are up to this task or if users would be happy with this level of invasion remain to be seen, but I am confident that this is how the Facebook of tomorrow will function.
Thoughts or comments are appreciated.
