There was a company back in the 1st boom that was making apparels and other gear with your "ID" printed on it boldly. And you could take someone's ID and put it

There was a company back in the 1st boom that was making apparels and other gear with your "ID" printed on it boldly. And you could take someone's ID and put it on the site and communicate with that person. Seemed like a roundabout way of just walking up to the person and saying "hello my name is E". But to answer your question, a hardware-aided webapp could take off if it was backed by the right "webapp". If facebook, linkedIn, Match, etc. came out with a hardware (although why wouldn't you just write an iPhone app nowadays), that facilitated physical social networking then it might work. Although IMO, people still like to keep a difference between their online and offline lives. We are going to see a large numbers of mobile social networking companies in the next few years. It is the only logical next step for social networks, to go from in front of computers to location aware.