Reach out and tap someone on the shoulder

Imagine you're sitting in an interview and your phone suddenly tells you that your friend John went to college with the person you are interviewing with.  Pretty cool huh?

I was just complaining the other day that radical innovation seems to be in short supply these days.  Then today I stumbled across this really cool idea called Mobile FOAF (they're calling it FoafMobile, but that sounds too much like a funny little car to me--maybe because it rhymes with PopeMobile?--so I'm calling it Mobile FOAF instead).  The basic idea is that friends and people you know, who are in close physical proximity to you, can be discovered using Bluetooth-compatible mobile devices.  It's a small world, after all...

The gist of it is that each Bluetooth device has a unique identifying address (like a MAC address), and if you put that address in somebody's FOAF graph you can trace a Bluetooth device back to its owner.  You could query your FOAF graph for anyone you know who has that particular Bluetooth device, and even ask your phone to show you if anyone in the restaurant knows any of your friends.  If so you could pull up their name and picture and go find them to have a cup of coffee.  A magician could have a field day with this stuff.

The writeup I found on Mobile FOAF is actually pretty old (2003), but I'm not sure how something like this would have been useful before SPARQL was ratified this year anyway.  <hint>Hopefully this will get picked up by some enterprising company and taken to market,</hint> because this would certainly be some radical innovation.  If a Bluetooth "beacon" could be baked into wireless routers you wouldn't even need GPS to locate somebody...