Facebook announces 'Nearby Friends' feature to connect with real time friends

Facebook on Thursday announced Nearby Friends, a new feature built into Facebook's mobile app that allows you to see which of your friends are close by, and even share your exact location with others. The new feature uses the geolocation technology in your smart phone to determine when you are close to one of your Facebook friends. When activated, the feature will send periodic notifications alerting you to friends who are nearby. Users have been able to check in on Facebook for some time, meaning you can already share your location as part of a post, but Nearby Friends allows you to broadcast your general location to Facebook friends without posting at all.

"We saw in the data that even though everybody was talking about social discovery, the data wasn’t corroborating that. It was the opposite." says Glancee founder Andrea Vaccari, who’s now a product manager at Facebook. "Our users were not engaging as often with [strangers] nearby. They were using it just to meet up with friends." After joining Facebook, Vaccari was tasked not with building a people-discovery app, but with building a friend-discovery app. After two years in the pipeline, Nearby Friends begins rolling out today on Android and iOS.

Apple’s Find My Friends and other standalone apps already offer the ability to see the location of nearby people who you’ve added, but Vaccari thinks that the precise "face on a map" approach employed by these apps turns people off. "While building Glancee, we learned that sharing that you’re nearby is a lot more powerful than sharing exactly where you are," says Vaccari, "because people are much more likely to share with a larger audience." Sharing your neighborhood is certainly 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. Programmatically creating serendipitous encounters might make these magical moments feel less magical. Ambushing a friend after seeing their check-in on Foursquare or Facebook can be awkward.

Mashable has listed some points to how to use Nearby Friends

• To see friends in your area, turn on Nearby Friends in settings within the mobile app. This feature is opt-in, meaning you must manually activate it if you want to be seen (or see others). Once the feature is activated, you'll go through a small tutorial that explains how to use the feature.
• You can select the groups on Facebook with which you want to share your location. You can't share your location with the public or with friends of friends. You can only share it with friends or other groups that you have created, like "close friends" or "family."
• Facebook will notify you when friends are nearby, at which point you can message those friends if you want to connect. You won't be able to see a friend's exact location, however. For example, the app may say that a friend is within two miles, but the exact coordinates will not be shared automatically.
• The app won't specify a distance closer than 0.5 miles, but Nearby Friends can discover people that are much further away — even on a separate coast. One Facebook employee used the feature to track another employee's travels through Europe.
• You can show your exact location to a friend, if you so choose, by sharing your location on a map for a set amount of time (until 6 p.m., for example) or by sharing your location indefinitely. When you choose this option, the friend you share with will have access to your exact location in real-time. Sharing your specific location may make sense if you are trying to help someone find you for lunch or drinks. Otherwise, simply being alerted that a friend is in the area may be enough.
• If you turn on Nearby Friends, it will not turn off automatically. You will continue to broadcast your approximate location until the feature is manually turned off. Users be reminded that they are sharing their location thanks to push notifications, says Vaccari.

According to TechCrunch, the feature could spell trouble for other location sharing apps like Foursquare and Google Latitude that haven’t reached ubiquity, as Facebook has built it into its core iOS and Android apps that have enormous userbases. It could also challenge the friend-gathering features of Highlight, Banjo, Sonar, Connect, and more startups. Leaving Nearby Friends on will cause some battery drain, but not as bad as some other location apps, according to Facebook.

As for privacy, Nearby Friends is opt-in so you can ignore it and never have to use it if you don’t want to. It’s only available to people over 18. It uses a reciprocal privacy model so you can only see your proximity to friends if you both have it turned on, and you can only see someone’s exact location if they purposefully share it with you. While you can select the specific list or group of friends you want to share your proximity with, many people may simply keep this visible to all their friends — a very wide net. This and how easy it is to forget to turn off Nearby Friends could lead to inadvertent “oversharing”. But used properly, Nearby Friends could help people gather with more friends for Tuesday dinners, Friday night parties, or Saturdays in the park.