Do you really want your Facebook friends to know that you are in their vicinity? In the recent past, we have seen several location based apps that search for near by people and Facebook acquired one of them called Glancee. After joining Facebook, the Glancee team was tasked not with building a people-discovery app, but with building a friend-discovery app. After two years in the the making, Nearby Friends begins rolling out today on Android and iOS according to the company’s news site.
Just to make things clear, Nearby Friends isn’t an app — it’s just an optional feature presented as a tab inside the Facebook app’s “More” menu. Tapping Nearby Friends lets you opt in to using the feature,you will be able to see which of your friends are nearby, assuming they’ve also turned on the feature. You will they see a list of friend locations by neighborhood, or if the friend is far enough away, by city. Thereafter you can able to message them to arrange a meet-up just by tapping on them. The location-arrow button can help you to send a friend your precise location. If you’ve enabled Nearby Friends, Facebook will also send you a push notification if somebody unexpected turns up nearby.
The power lies in sharing your near by locality than your actual position
Facebook is clearly dedicated to Nearby Friends as key component of its app, as it has but is not sure where to put it. The company believes for privacy reasons sharing your neighborhood is less creepy than sharing what restaurant you’re eating at with the world, but it remains to be seen if people really want to see who’s around. As lurking a friend after seeing their check-in on Foursquare or Facebook can be awkward.
Will location based features, that means phones will need to gallop more battery juice, but Facebook says that the feature has a minimal impact on the phone’s battery. This was made possible by using the triangulation method 90 percent of the time unlike the more battery-intensive GPS. They estimate will consume about 9.6 percent of your phone battery in full day and if you reach 20 percent of your battery life, that app will stop.
The End Games is Ads
Not only is Nearby Friends about helping you find friends it’s also about helping Facebook find you. This new feature will help Facebook track your location every 15 minutes or so, even if it’s only on a general, neighborhood level.
With better data on the location of its users, Facebook could potentially show more relevant ads, make better recommendations (when and if the company’s Graph Search feature launches on mobile), and enhance location-based Groups.
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