Facebook Quietly Rolls Out 'Find Friends Nearby' - Should You Care?
by Tommy Ly
June 24, 2012
Facebook wants you to have friends. You don't really have to be friends with them. Occasionally "liking" a picture or post is enough. Half-heartedly wishing someone a happy birthday gets the job done, too. Whether or not you actively use Facebook to stay connected to your friends, the company has made it much easier to find new ones, as TechCruch reports.
Find Friends Nearby has just been pushed out by Facebook and allows you to, you guessed it, find friends nearby. Now, this isn't to find the people that are already on your friends list, but to actually find new people to connect with. The new feature, initially dubbed "Friendshake," can be accessed in your browser at http://fb.com/ffn, or on Facebook's official iOS and Android apps by going to Menu>Apps>Find Friends>Other Tools>Find Friends Nearby.
The feature locates anyone viewing the Friend Friends Nearby page within a certain radius to your location and presumably allows you to send them a friend request. From my testing, there wasn't anyone using the page, but that isn't surprising.
With iOS 6's heavy Facebook integration, do you think Apple or Facebook will take anything from one another? Apple's Find My Friends allows you to essentially track your friends across any distance, while Facebook's current check-in feature lets you know when a friend is checked-in to a nearby business. I would assume there to be some privacy issues with Find Friends Nearby (stalkers, anyone?), but since the feature requires that you have the page open for anyone to locate you, I don't think it poses much of a threat.
But what do you think? Will location-based friend finding becoming a bigger part of iOS? Or, is Facebook's Find Friends Nearby already an idea on death row?
Source: TechCrunch