Airline Using Facebook To Turn Jet Cabin Into High School Cafeteria

As adults, most of us are perfectly okay with the notion that it doesn’t really matter who you sit next to on the plane. You take your seat, eat your free peanuts and sleep through Two & a Half Men reruns. But Dutch airline KLM is testing a new service that allows Facebook and LinkedIn users to try to find the cool kids’ section of the plane.

The service, called Meet and Seat, lets ticketed passengers with profiles on either of these networks to post info from their profile to a page that lets you pick and choose your seat based on proximity to others who have decided to share their data.

So if by some miracle that empty seat next to the super cute manic pixie dream girl is still available, it’s all yours.

Writes the NY Times:

On a flight from Amsterdam to S√£o Paulo this week, for example, you could have chosen the director of a British answering service, who has a passion for reggae and jazz; an Italian chemical engineer fluent in Dutch, English, Spanish and Portuguese; or a Norwegian alternative-rock fan en route to visit family in Argentina.

Because we are not 14 years old anymore, Meet and Seat doesn’t give users veto power over who gets to sit next to them. There is, however, a way out of a potentially awkward pairing; you can just select another open seat. And if the aforementioned manic pixie dream girl suddenly realizes that every guy on the flight is crowding around her seat, she can always just delete her profile and pick a seat the boring non-social way.

Selecting a Seatmate to Make Skies Friendlier [NY Times]

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