Facebook friends you can reach out and touch

It's pretty standard to have never actually met whole reams of your Facebook friends, which seems fine until you remember the kind of fun poking total strangers used to be. For a social network aiming to pull your virtual friendships into reality-reality, join London-launched Uberlife, whose web presence and iApp are now in beta. The lowdown:

The mission: To facilitate and encourage real-world hookups between contacts from popular social media sites. How it could all go horribly wrong: Trick question! Meeting people in person who you originally met over the internet CANNOT go wrong.

How they plan to accomplish it: They have you import your Facebook/Twitter deets (location, likes, photos, friends, etc.). Then they ask you to either create or head to a Hangout: essentially just a time, a place, and a purpose (a gig, drinks after work, getting matching tattoos, etc.). The Hangouts are geo-located, and members are tagged according to likes/interests, so you'll know what you're getting into, at least insofar as likes/interests are indicators of anything other than the compulsion to not leave internet forms blank. How it could all go horribly wrong: When you realize that, while your ironic love for The Darling Buds of May might inspire hilarious Net back-and-forths, it does not inspire people to come to your place for a marathon screening, no matter how hot Catherine Zeta-Jones was.

The catch they hope serves as inducement: You can only become Uberlife "friends" with someone you've actually met at a Hangout. How it could all go horribly wrong: You realize that having 834 friends is really only a good idea in the fake world, especially when the answer to the trick question above turns out to be a trick answer.