“Hi, I saw your profile, mind if I sit next to you? For the next seven hours?”

In media world, I suppose this piece of information is now ancient, but I am still intrigued. (I caught the whim of it via twitter, and here.)

KLM Airlines have proposed a “Meet & Seat” service for the allocation of seats on board their flights, using the information available on individual passengers’ social media pages (specifically Facebook and Linkedin). Let us have a look at their presentation video:

The company suggests that you can use the service to network, and possibly even find somebody with whom to share a taxi after the flight.

From personal experience, as lovely as it would be to have interesting company on a long-haul flight, seasoned solo long-haul flyers seem to prefer sleeping, reading a book to get away from day-to-day business, or tapping away on their laptops/tablets/gizmos. It is of course voluntary, so at least one can be sure that people who sign up for the service will be interested in conversation, and probably not otherwise have company. I nearly talked myself into sitting on the fence, but then thought: “what if they seemed alright on their profile, but are actually a massive, pretentious twat?” This is very cynical of me, but it could be a possibility. Again, personally, I have had the luck to alternately sit next to all manners of travellers, and find the change in in-flight entertainment rather pleasant. Sometimes it is nice not to have  expectations, which I believe is what will become of this tool.

…and all of this is aside from the fact that it seems mildly, to put it in colloquial terms, “stalky”. What do you think?