The current swell of new, location-focused social media apps indicates the next major evolution in the space; social media is moving beyond who you know to who you should want to know. Apps connecting physically proximate people that share interests or connections are launching at breakneck speed, but terms like “winner” and “mainstream” are still far in the distance.

Proponents of these apps talk about engineering serendipity. They talk about how great it is to find out that the person with whom you have been trying to connect for weeks is actually in the coffee shop across the street. How fantastic it is when you get alerted that someone with whom you share five mutual friends, and who will surely be your next best friend, is sitting at the bar of the restaurant you are in.

But two huge problems plague the space. Most important are concerns about privacy. In addition to some of the technical and functionality related privacy issues, for which Highlight, one of the front runners in the space, has been called out for – there is the underlying opposition, held by many, to giving people in your surrounds automatic access to personal details about your life.

Second, (and this is really just me being nostalgic) if you are engineering serendipity, is it still serendipity? As our devices are more and more often the source of the information behind our decisions, playing an ever larger role in the orchestration of our lives, will there be much room for old-fashioned serendipity? It’s hard to say. And will we even want it anymore? It’s easy to imagine that the benefits could outweigh the losses.

This article, about eyeball-embedded augmented reality, among other things, talks about that increasing reliance on our devices and on “external knowledge”—if we know a piece of information is easily accessible online, via our ever-present devices, then we are free to release it from our brain and what we actually, truly know changes. The idea that we know less seems unlikely but is possible. You don’t really need to know how to get somewhere or what the water-to-rice ratio is.

With these apps, you no longer even have to commit someone’s name to memory. Your phone will alert you that a person is near, and you will have instant access to a bevy of information about the coworker, fellow gym rat or neighbor. Just make sure you sneak in that glance at your phone soon enough.

Forget the privacy concerns, forget any buggy interfaces that might accompany beta launches, forget that for some of these apps to be useful, there have to be more than a handful of people using them—forget all that. Do you want your serendipity served up by a digital buzz in your pocket? Tweet us @peteramayer or tell us on Facebook if this is the next best or next worst thing.