Breaking news! Facebook could be introducing QR codes to profile pages soon. These codes, for those of you who don't know, are a bit like the barcodes you find on products you might buy in your local shop, but are capable of holding more complex information such as a website address or a short message. Interestingly the functionality seems to have disappeared now, but after seeing this tweet (which pointed to some more information available at: http://www.technicavita.org/social-tech/mobile-sites/introduction-to-mobile-barcode-qr-technology.html):
qr
A long while ago I wrote about the advantages of Mobile Codes, 2D barcodes that can contain text snippets or URLs that can be interpreted by a camera phone to save the user having to input lots of text on their mobile device. I'm using the term Mobile Codes here to mean both Datamatrix and QR format barcodes.
4777333366448844433777712226666 - a crazy long number, but what does it mean? It represents how you input 'greenhughes.com' into a browser on a mobile phone in terms of key-presses, that is without the pauses required to input the address correctly. Entering an address into a mobile web browser can be a time consuming and pretty miserable task, this example just takes you to the front page, if you wanted to get the RSS feed, which can work really well on a mobile phone, you will be confronted with an even longer task. Every day we walk past resources that feature web addresses with our mobile phones, like adverts, books, magazines and don't bother to use our mobile devices with them. Why? Well it just takes too long. This leads to a bit of a lost opportunity, fortunately there is a way to get web addresses, text and phone numbers onto your mobile by using a technology known as mobile codes, a two dimensional barcode (rather than the one dimensional bar codes scanned by the tills at shops) that contains a small amount of information within it that can be transferred by using the camera on the mobile to pick up the mobile code and turn it back to text. The whole process is quite painless for the user and takes advantage of the cameras on phones that have improved greatly over the last couple of years.