Here’s the problem: when you meet somebody, you can exchange business cards, and maybe that business card has your facebook or linkedin url.
Then later, that person can send you an invite or a friend request based on how you gave them your URL.
It would be nicer to more quickly close this gap, so that at the moment you meet somebody, you can instantly “friend” each other, sort of like this:
- I’m talking to somebody that asks me for my card. I pull out my mobile phone and so do they. I tell them my phone number, and they text a message to some other third party service with the message payload being my phone number.
- Then the other person tells me their phone number and I send a text message to that same third party service with the other guy’s phone number.
- The third-party system links the accounts associated with the two phone numbers as “friends”.
- Later when I check my account on the third-party service, I see all the contact info for the person I met.
This ain’t rocket science. Just a faster way to share contact information. Does this already exist?
Instead of using SMS, the system could also use HTTP posts, but not every phone has internet access. In addition to just using my phone number, maybe me and the other person could both agree to send in a short password, which must match before the system links the two accounts.