Strangers in a Crowd

A random idea for an iPhone Application: Apple announced they would provide bonjour discovery of devices in the iPhone 3.0 software.  (They announced it to the world, so it’s not covered by the iPhone SDK NDA, you NDA nazis.)

My mind was w[oa]ndering and I thought of an interesting, odd, but compelling idea for an iPhone application.

Strangers.  You can discover devices in the area.  You invite them all to play Strangers.  The push notifications show a “badge icon” (that red number) showing you have been invited to play.  Any number of people join in.  It becomes a game of 20 questions to discover who each is.  That means YES or NO questions only.

Player A (Q3) to Player C (Q2): Are you wearing red?

Player A is asking his/her third question.  This question is of Player C and is the second question asked of C.

To put a little twist on it, we could of course have one Bot running on each device and have it asking and answering questions as well.  (It would not answer truthfully, it would answer randomly.)

It’s a little creepy of an idea, but i can imagine there being at least one “discover strangers” application.  In some places it would be fun – MacWorld convention.

Perhaps just the anonymous, concurrent 20 questions game that people could join into and leave at will would be more feasible.  You can’t ask another question if one is pending for you to answer.

Anyway, that’s a random app idea in my head.  FWIW.

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