Finding your friends on Facebook has never been easier thanks to a new development from the team at Facebook.
“Find Friends Nearby” is being hailed a cool new location-enabled feature that Facebook has integrated into its native iOS and Android applications.
As you might imagine, the new feature is designed to assist Facebook users in a purely social exercise – finding friends nearby.
“The service comes a little under two months after Facebook announced the acquisition of Glancee,” Tech Crunch reported Monday, “a mobile app that helps users discover people near them with similar interests, whose three founders have now joined Facebook and closed down their app.”
Users, however, are required to be logged into Facebook AND the Find Friends Nearby service. Otherwise, profile and location data can’t be shared.
“For me, the ideal use case for this product is the one where when you’re out with a group of people whom you’ve recently met and want to stay in contact with,” says Facebook engineer Ryan Patterson. “Facebook search might be effective, or sharing your vanity addresses or business cards, but this tool provides a really easy way to exchange contact information with multiple people with minimal friction.”
It should also be pointed out that the new feature will even work with Facebook’s mobile website.
With nearly 500 million active Facebook users on mobile today, it’s a safe bet that “Find Friends Nearby” will help social networking addicts do exactly that on a very frequent basis.
