Facebook (News - Alert)has managed to cause a great deal of consternation among its users by arbitrarily introducing a couple of extra options on selected people's Profile page that are centered on QR codes. Unfortunately, this technology trial seems to have backfired.

Reports soon spread across Facebook that two new options have mysteriously appeared overnight on certain people's Profile pages: 'View QR Barcode' and 'Generate status QR barcode." One publication, Softpedia.com, managed to capture an illustration of this new 'test' application.

In actuality, the application is completely innocuous. It takes a Facebook user's 'status' statement and converts that into a 2D barcode which can be read by any good barcode-scanning package such as the NeoReader from NeoMedia. So, in effect, one option is to generate this barcode and the second is to view it so the image can be scanned. The fact that Facebook chose to use QR codes rather than an alternative such as a Datamatrix is, in itself, interesting. It suggests that the initiative for this new application may have stemmed from Asia where QR codes are commonplace.

What Facebook hadn't counted on, however, is the fact that the vast majority of its users still don't know what a QR code is. Consequently, Facebook's help pages were flooded with messages from affected users who couldn't understand why such an option had suddenly appeared. Typical comments included, 'I'm worried it's a hacker or virus or something,' 'Are we being tracked?,' and 'I'm about ready to delete FB all together...too scary not knowing what people are doing with your private info...grrrrr.' See here for more information.

Surprisingly, Facebook's support personnel provided no response to assuage users' worries.  When asked to clarify the situation, a Facebook spokesperson simply responded, 'We are constantly experimenting with new ideas and products internally. We don't have anything to announce publicly at this time.' This attitude seems to be somewhat short-sighted since the company didn't even provide an FAQ about QR codes. MBIC has previously provided such an explanation here.

The irony is that Facebook's test introduction of QR/2D barcodes is far from sophisticated. The aim is to turn a Facebook user's mood statement into a barcode. Fortunately, one Facebook user, Kerem Erkan, has attempted to illustrate how such a QR application would work if it became universal. If you visit his siteand go to the PHP and QR code and data matrix generator option, you'll see that Erkan provides a 'update your Facebook Status' application. This can be accessed from the 'Select a Code Action' box. Type in the same sentence you have used on your Facebook profile page and Erkan's generator will turn it onto a 2D code. This should be very similar to Facebook's 'Generate status QR barcode' option.

While Facebook should be applauded for raising awareness of 2D barcodes in general, it appears to have done so in an uncharacteristically haphazard manner.

Tony Dennis is a freelance writer and communications consultant. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi