Just imagine – you walk down the hallway, past your co-workers, past your bosses, past the HR department and on to the company keg. You pull a handy little RFID-enabled card out of your pocket, hold it up to a reader, and immediately everyone knows that you’re helping yourself to a 2 p.m. Newcastle on a Wednesday.
If you’re a Facebook employee, then you’re well aware of this reality, and today, at Facebook’s F8 developer conference, the company is testing out broader uses for this type of technology.
The company is calling this technology Facebook Presence, based on the “Keg Presence Hack,” which is described as a way to “give employees a way to share when they were having a beer. Employees would tap their badge, get their photo taken, and generate a feed story whilst grabbing a beer with friends.”
[Image via All Facebook]
According to All Facebook’s Nick O’Neill, the new technology is being tested today, with all F8 attendees “receiving special RFID tags that enable them to check-in to various locations throughout the conference venue.”
O’Neill says that there is a visualization of people’s checkins being displayed at the conference, but that it only shows in terms of places and doesn’t show a real-time tracking of people as they physically move about the conference center.
This sort of technology would be a different take on location-based checkin systems, wherein the user has the onus of owning the proper technology. Giving users RFID chips and having the venues bear the burden of expensive technology (in the form of RFID readers in this case) – as long as the incentive to purchase this technology is there – approaches location-based services from the opposite direction and could potentially bring location to a large number of users.
To find out where Facebook plans to go with this technology and more, you can watch live with us or read along on our live blog of the F8 conference.
