The world’s biggest social network – Facebook looks set for an impressive overhaul. It has rolled out a new feature allowing users of its mobile app to use smartphone location to discover friends near them.
The website is already crammed with features. Addition of another extra however does not complicate Facebook use. Dubbed ‘Nearby Friends’, the opt-in feature adds the ability to check how close/distant your friends are from you at all times.
Nearby feature is turned off by default. It requires your permission in order to broadcast your location. A user has to navigate to ‘More’ section of the iOS and Android Facebook app, where he can choose to broadcast his/her location to certain people within his/her friends list.
The feature would then display users’ distance from nearby friends in increments of a mile, and would also provide timestamps of when each person was in a location, and when that location was queried.
Precisely, the feature doesn’t pinpoint accurately your location but lets you and your friends know your proximity to one another. Should you find a friend in proximity, you can ping them.
“If you turn on Nearby Friends, you’ll occasionally be notified when friends are nearby, so you can get in touch with them and meet up,” Facebook said in a blog post.
Users who sign up will be guided by a short tutorial on how the feature works. Besides, users can also get information about their friends’ traveling routes. Is Facebook introducing this feature to add another way of generating revenue via advertising scheme as it has been doing for quite some time now?
Facebook says there are no current plans to draw advertising revenue from Nearby Friends feature and added they do not currently target ads to users based on where they happen to be at the moment.
