Apple wants to help you meet new people -- by sharing what's on your iPhone. The company has filed a patent for a method of "ad hoc networking based on content and location" which, simply put, allows you to contact complete strangers nearby based on your shared interests and phone usage.
Apple wants to ease the awkwardness of meeting like-minded people in the real world, TUAW reports. Apparently, when away from the safety of your laptop and Facebook friend requests, you have to talk to people face to face to get to know them. A sobering thought.
However, this "often requires a substantial amount of and time and effort because identifying new persons with common interests for friendships is difficult," according to the application. Indeed, life isn't always played out at speed-dating pace and people don't walk around with 'Like' buttons grafted to them.
"When two strangers meet, it may take a long and awkward conversation to discover their common interests or experiences," Apple says. Yeah, we hate it when you have to put any effort into a conversation.
Apparently it's far better to sit down with your iPhone or iPad and use it like a radar, pinpointing other people in the vicinity who you might get along with.
Obviously, Apple doesn't want another privacy disaster on its hands, so users would have to opt in to share various tidbits of information about themselves. As well as filling in a few basic facts about their likes, dislikes and hobbies, the handset might also match people based on the music and photos stored on their phone and what places they've visited.
If you like listening to Rebecca Black, have taken lots of photos of black labradors, recently returned from a conference in Blackpool and pretend you have a black belt in karate, Apple's system may be able to find someone for you. Let's hope she doesn't look like the person in the patent drawing.
A previous Apple patent would allow existing contacts to find one another if they were in the same area. Services such as Foursquare and Facebook Places do a similar thing already and you don't have to own Apple gear to use it.
Would you appreciate it if technology helped you to get to know complete strangers, or are old-fashioned concepts like eye contact and talking still best at initiating contact?
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Naryan 18 June, 2011 19:32
People are going to want to use this service to find people of the opposite gender (CNet forbids the "S" word apparently). Apple hasn't said this of course, but they know it. In fact almost every aspect of their marketing plays in some part towards their product attracting the attention of the opposite gender to the buyer.
The problem in this case is that people will never want to leave their phones at home, turn off the feature, turn off the phone itself, or put their phones on silent. All just in case the day they put their phone on silent was that special day they might have met that special someone.
This is going to lead to a headache. Not to mention the thing that everybody has already caught on to, the fact that people are, slowly but surely, going to lose their social skills. By people I mean people with iPhones. But hey, they've got more social skills than everybody else anyway right? I mean, why else would they have an Apple product?