This is the reason I scoff when people try to describe an average "Redditor". With the sheer amount of traffic coming through their site it's impossible to come up with an accurate generalization of what the community as a whole feels, even with the small percentage of traffic actually commenting and voting.
I would like to see a lot more emphasis be put on the decision between serving the will of the users, establishing a set of ideals that Reddit chooses to run things by, or a mixture of the two.
The facebook chips made me think about things like the ability to tap on a phone and give user information, which would be nifty- to a point.
What about a system that would let a user know what seats that their friends are sitting in? That would eliminate the stress that finding a friend in a large conference room is.
I think Addieu (http://addieu.com) is doing something like your first point: tap your respective phones to exchange contact info and social networks (full disclosure: I'm one of the cofounders, and we're iPhone only right now).
As for your second, if you know what your friends look like, you don't need to know exactly where they're sitting, so you don't need RFID. SitBy.Us (http://sitby.us) illustrates this perfectly: if they found a biz dev guy and expanded beyond SXSW & Mozilla Summit Conf, they'd be killing it. If Lanyrd is smart, they'll snap up or clone SitBy.Us.
I would like to see a lot more emphasis be put on the decision between serving the will of the users, establishing a set of ideals that Reddit chooses to run things by, or a mixture of the two.