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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps "remember when you met with your friends?"

But taking a photo (possibly a group photo) is a more natural way to do that. Maybe it should integrate with photo-taking somehow?

It would be annoying if you met up, forgot to do the ritual in person, and had no way to fix it.

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While this probably could only be done with the cooperation of Apple/Google, something like what they did for contact tracing during the pandemic would be ideal. Picking up that you were in the proximity of various friends without any active effort.

https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing

That sounds creepy to me. Taking a photo together doesn't seem like friction to be removed?

Doing it via a photo implies facial recognition, which can potentially be more creepy for people. Is it happening on device or in the cloud? Do I need to register my face when joining the service? What happens to that data if the service is sold at some point in the future?

I wouldn't use facial recognition. The idea would be that you take the group photo and share it with everyone using the phone-bumping ritual, and it shows up in your profiles.

But that only works if the social network has enough privacy safeguards that sharing personal photos on it makes sense. Maybe the network just shares the photos encrypted?

And if you can't share photos with your friends on it, it seems kind of limited as social networks go?

How about "friend-request-by-mail" where you pay Friendster a token amount to send a postcard with a unique QR code?

I don't really like the idea of an app telling me how to manage my friendships, my view is that people can handle their relationships without intervention. I'm not sure what problem it is trying to solve.

It gives you one way to experience your friendship. It’s not telling you how you should manage them. You can use it for just a few friends. Or ignore it completely

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