Make Flying Even Worse by Picking Your Seatmate on Facebook
In an effort to answer the question, "what could possibly make the act of traveling by plane worse without violating the Geneva Conventions," KLM is rolling out a new feature next year that will allow you to choose your seatmate. Through Facebook!
Since the entire flying experience is already built on a foundation of complete and utter humiliation and the loss of any kind of dignity and privacy, this new feature is a natural fit: instead of spending several agonizing hours yelling at a stranger over the engine noise, you can spend hours yelling at a near-stranger, and then still pretend to be asleep when she comes back from the bathroom! It's like a wonderful online dating service, if it only had a few dozen members, and for the date you were strapped into a tiny chair and forced to watch Fred Claus.
And, indeed, there are already services that do it. Get in on the ground floor!
A company called Planely that's already up and running provides a similar service. Travelers create a profile with the online company and link it to Twitter, Tripit, LinkedIn or Facebook. When they're ready to go, they provide their flight information and choose a flying buddy.
"You can then make arrangements to sit together on the plane, have a coffee on the ground or share a cab home," Planely's website says. "Why? We believe that your fellow fliers are the greatest untapped resource of knowledge and entertainment on your plane journeys."
