Have you met someone you want to 'add' to your Facebook but don't want to bother with all the troublesome introductions, words & eye contact? No problem! Simply use your phone to scan the barcode printed on their back! 
This is the promise made by the Add to Friends Facebook app. The application creates a custom QR Code for your Facebook profile and sends you to Zazzle to print your own barcoded T-shirt. Then any passerby who waves their phone at you can find you online! Of course it doesn't have to be Facebook and it doesn't have to be a T-shirt. QR Codes can be used to encode any URLs, phone numbers, free-form text or binary data. The mobile phone needs special reading software to make sense of the code. While most phones do not yet have this functionality, newer Nokia smartphones have it built-in and there are many free QR Code readers available for other phones. I tried out a couple of them and was quite impressed by the speed and accuracy of the code recognition. However the whole interaction is still pretty clunky. Until most phones come with built-in readers that are accessible from a dedicated button (or from within the camera application) I see limited use for QR codes in the real world. However the geek in me can't help chuckling with glee at the coolness of it! Update: it seemed a bit silly to have a post about QR codes that didn't include a code. So, what does that pattern of black and white squares mean?
