Thursday, April 22, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Facebook Presence: Location At f8 Through RFID
Today at Facebook’s f8 conference in San Francisco, the company have given all attendees a small RFID tag attached to their conference badge. This tag is a part of something called “Facebook Presence” which allows you to “check-in” at various places around the conference simply by swiping your badge. Yes, it’s location.
This is actually the same thing Facebook uses for its infamous keg bot at its headquarters. Employees have been using this for a long time, now they’re letting the rest of us in on the fun. To use it, you go to this page and manually type in your tag number to link it to your Facebook account. Then, everytime you swipe your badge somewhere, it goes right to your profile. Apparently, you can also tag yourself in photos this way.
While we’ve known for a while that Facebook would use QR codes as a part of its location strategy, it’s not clear if this is actually something Facebook plans on using more widescale. Certainly needing to carry around a tag with you is a barrier to entry — as is getting venues to install these readers. Hopefully we’ll hear more about this during the conference today.
