Whoever says Faebook is making us more anti-social must be wrong. After all, Facebook is even trying to encourage its users to meet face-to-face with its new Nearby Friends feature. Nearby Friends is a fancy new way to use your location services to tell friends where you are and when you're on the move, so they can come join you.
Nearby Friends is the natural extension of Facebook's original mission to connect people. Users can turn the function on and off anytime they want, so there's no need to fear for your safety. If you want to allow your Facebook friends to access your location, you can. By the same token, if you don't want to, you don't have to. Even so, privacy and Internet security advocates will undoubtedly take issue with the new idea.
The idea behind Nearby Friends is hardly nefarious, though. With Nearby Friends, Facebook aims to connect users based on their location. Maybe you're in the city and you want to go see a movie, but you don't have anybody to go with. If you want some company, you can check Facebook to see who's around. Then, supposing you're lucky, you'll see that some of your friends are in the neighborhood. At that point, you just share your exact location with them and send a message inviting them to the movies.
The new feature lets you share your exact location, a map, a message and a time frame for how long you'll be in a certain place, so that if your friends don't answer right away, they can see you'll be free to meet up for another 30 minutes or so.
Facebook will even let you choose which friends you show your location to, so if you only actually like to see 10 of your 1,000 Facebook friends in real life, you can make it so only those 10 people know your location. This feature is especially useful when you don't want certain people to find you.
In some ways, Nearby Friends is like Four Square - it lets others know where you are - but it's even more intricate and cool because you can actually invite people to join your impromptu party. The Nearby Friends feature seems particularly useful for Facebook users in big cities like New York, but it could also work well for suburban folks who are bumming around the mall.
The update will be available on both Android and iOS in the coming weeks.
