You’re probably thinking what a thmart title!
For those of you who don’t know, FOAF stands for Friend of a Friend. It is a social network description format based on RDF.
If people where to have their FOAFs encoded on RFID tags (along with User ID) and placed inside their watch (think Casio G-Shock) then whenever FOAF-watch-wearing users come within the coverage area of an RFID scanner network (in the real world) the network would detect if they have 1st, 2nd or 3rd-degree friend in common and transmit a signal to their watches which would in turn beep and display the name of the party in common as well as the name of the second party and their location relative to a given node within the RFID scanner network.
This would be cool to have at geek/IT conferences.
I’m very busy nowadays but I promise to write every now and then.
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[…] Use the FOAF, Luke […]
Cell phones and bluetooth, perhaps? Or Wi-Fi even? For it to pick up the RFID it couldn’t just be passive, it would have to be sniffing for other tags… I don’t know how that would impact battery life, probably not too much. Even if it was 0 watts (piezo?) the interface, even on a g-shock, would be a little cumbersome. MSFT’s watch info-pushing swat junk isn’t so hot, is it? On a cell phone, though…
Then again, it wouldn’t be all that novel on a cell phone, for all the extended functionality it might offer the concept.
The RFID itself is passive. The scanning nodes (that make up the RFID scanner network) are active.
The RFID in the watch does not use the battery.
The watch listens to data from the RFID scanner network (which communicates with the watch in addition to scanning each watch’s RFID tag.) The watch would implement an FM receiver and would wait for digital packets over FM with ID matching that of the watch. When it gets that data it displays it.
With cell phones and bluetooth you have to be close to the person for bluetooth to discover and comunicate and the phone would have to have software on it.
The watch concept allows the people to be as geographically distributed as the RFID scanner network itself.
My model kicks yours in the butt! :)
Marc