Dots!

QR codes are little square versions of a barcode that can be recognized by pretty much any device with a camera nowadays and can embed lots of useful info. QR for Quick Response. These things are going to be popping up everywhere.

Apparently they’re already very big in Japan.

Put your business on Google’s map of the world with the newly-announced Google Places, and a cool thing you get is a custom-generated QR code for your company. There was a lot of press on this today but BusinessWeek’s writeup shows what I’m talking about if you missed it.

Facebook, too, seems to be gearing up to launch custom QR codes for people. While it’s not clear exactly how they plan for these things to work in the Facebook world, I think it’s a reasonably clever idea to make people scannable too.

Maybe if you wore a tee-shirt with your QR code on it I could zap you with Facebook on my iPhone and we could be friends.

QR codes can embed pretty much any type of information. Commonly things like web addresses and phone numbers and contact info, but also company profile information (Google) and people profile information (Facebook). Interesting applications for couponing certainly (this is what Google is thinking about) and another important piece of the social media–mobile, specifically–marketing puzzle.

A solution for checkin fatigue. Or so it seems to me. I assure you, if you haven’t felt the fatigue yet you would’ve.

Here’s the QR code for this post… in case you want to zap it and come straight back here: