A patent filed by Facebook has been uncovered that could turn nearby weirdos into friends.
Facebook is eyeing the future technology that could suggest “friends” that are physically nearby. That data would be combined with other criteria such as when users likely had meetings and how long the meetings lasted.
The problem is that this is essentially guesswork on Facebook’s part that may or may not include actual acquaintances or friends – the patent describes it as “inferred meetings” between one Facebook user and a second user.
“The plurality of factors can include… proximity between the first user and the second user, a frequency of inferred meetings between the first user and the second user, a duration of each of the inferred meetings between the first user and the second user, or a pattern of occurrences of inferred meetings between the first user and the second user,” the patent reads.
The patent proposes using, for example, a device’s gyroscope and accelerometer to analyze a user’s movement to see if two people are moving in the same pattern.- READ MORE