Today I was checking out ticket availability on Ticketmaster for tomorrow's football match between the Republic of Ireland and the Czech Republic (turns out I will not be finished work on time to go). Ticketmaster are experimenting with a neat new "Choose your seats with the interactive seat map!" tool which is still in beta. It lets you know what seats are available in each section of the ground so that you can book any of the free seats. Nothing new in this - theatres and cinemas have been doing this for a long time.
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| Click to enlarge. Screen capture from Ticketmaster.ie. |
But what's really cool is that they have included Facebook. If a Facebook user books a seat (and they agree to allow Ticketmaster to access their information) they will be flagged a Facebook user who has bought a seat - you can see who is sitting near you, or if any of your "friends" are in the ground. In the screen shot to the left I can see that there are 7 Facebook users in block 522. AND - you can see their seat numbers! So you can choose to sit near a "friend" (or not).
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| Down with this sort of thing! Image link to feck-yeah-fatherted.tumblr.com. |
But do we want "this sort of thing"? This is a clever use of Facebook, and no doubt we will be seeing lots more of it - before you know it there will be Facebook users all over the place. You can't even go to a football match to get away from it now! There's bound to be people "agin' it".
But I'm all for it - great use of technology. I'm not to worried about any privacy issues that might arise - think about it, you'll be at a football match with 40,000 other people. It doesn't get more public than that!
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