Vodafone blog

Facebook has quietly switched on a new feature that, as its name suggests, allows you to find people around you based on location data.

At first, it may seem a little scary, but the service isn’t anything like Google Latitude (or similar services). It doesn’t allow you to track the physical locations of your friends.

Facebook appears to have designed the service to protect user privacy.

Users only appear in the list of people nearby when they are also on the Find Friends Nearby page. When they leave that page, they are removed from the list.

The creator, Ryan Patterson, says that it’s a useful tool for situations like where you’re out with a few people and want to quickly exchanged contact information.

Services like Foursquare have allowed you to do similar things for some time, but were limited by the amount of people registered for and actively using those services. As (almost) everyone uses Facebook, Find Friends Nearby won’t suffer from the same issues.

The new service is supported on the mobile web version of Facebook (http://fb.com/ffn), and also in Facebook’s iOS and Android Facebook applications (go to Menu > Apps > Find friends > Other tools > Find Friends Nearby).

What do you think of this new feature?

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Source: TechCrunch