I live in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, about 30 miles from the center. I have a local group of friends that I get together with on a weekly basis. But this feature seems like it might help me see my city-based friends on a more regular basis. Times that I drive into the city, or fly to other metro areas for conferences and meetings, I'd love to know if I have FB friends nearby to meet up with.
Facebook launches Nearby Friends
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Re: Facebook launches Nearby Friends
#32The folks who recently poured millions into connect.com are NOT going to be happy about this.
Re: Facebook launches Nearby Friends
#33Not really related, but does anyone know why newsroom.fb.com is running on WordPress?
Re: Facebook launches Nearby Friends
#34While most posts are touching on privacy or failure cases, I am still struggling to understand this product from a social perspective. First of all, this general idea has been floating around since companies like loopt, when mobile started taking off. I remember working through the use case considerations for this kind of product, and that's where it really dies. This breed of product is based on the idea that locati…
One place I can see this being useful is at music festivals or other large open-area events. Often you're going with other people, but you're not necessarily going to stick together the entire time. Being able to find each other easily would be a nice improvement, as phone-tag is a pretty terrible way to do it.
Re: Facebook launches Nearby Friends
#35I would prefer that my nearby friends not be launched anywhere.
Re: Facebook launches Nearby Friends
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might be interesting if they could add some kind of geofencing feature to it. So you could have it automatically be enabled when you're hanging out at the bar you go to when you want to see friends, but be disabled otherwise. It's good that they let you turn it on and off whenever you want, but having to do so manually seems like a chore that will cause me to just leave it off all the time.
Creating a whitelist sounds a bit tedious. Because it might look fun at first, you would add a few places, but then forget it forever, don't update them and the feature would slowly die. Blacklist makes more sense. E.g. I don't want people to know where exactly do I live. Or automatic disabling at specific dates, e.g. during the weekend.
Yeah, good point.
Re: Facebook launches Nearby Friends
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still there in Google+, under locations.
Maybe I remember them switching it from opt-out to opt-in then? Did that ever happen? I kind of wish it was opt-out by default, but I know that would probably cause a huge controversy. People are already collecting your location data anyway - might as well use it with your friends/people you'd actually want to have it.
Yeah I think that happened around the time they started sharing data between products. It's hella useful when it comes down to it (and you can be quite restrictive with your location in G+).
Re: Facebook launches Nearby Friends
#38What about automatically chatting with ANYONE nearby you that is using the app and "available" for chat? I think this will be a good idea. Imagine you in traffic, and launch the app to chat with the driver in the car side yours... The same could works when you go to party and don't try to find somebody "available" there.... This, for Facebook, should be easy, right?
The problem I see with this at large events such as rock concerts is the speed messages come in with. In just small group chats of 5 or 6 friends sometimes everyone sends so many messages that I can't keep up. What happens at a rock concert when you have hundreds of messages coming in? Will people even read them or take the time to scroll up to see past comments? At that point it basically becomes impossible to carry on conversations.
Re: Facebook launches Nearby Friends
#39While most posts are touching on privacy or failure cases, I am still struggling to understand this product from a social perspective. First of all, this general idea has been floating around since companies like loopt, when mobile started taking off. I remember working through the use case considerations for this kind of product, and that's where it really dies. This breed of product is based on the idea that locati…
Some of my best friends have moved to different parts of the country. And because of the distance, we simply talk less. But whenever we do meet up, it's like they never left.
Just because I don't talk to someone on a weekly basis doesn't mean I wouldn't want to meet up if it were convenient.
Re: Facebook launches Nearby Friends
#40What about automatically chatting with ANYONE nearby you that is using the app and "available" for chat? I think this will be a good idea. Imagine you in traffic, and launch the app to chat with the driver in the car side yours... The same could works when you go to party and don't try to find somebody "available" there.... This, for Facebook, should be easy, right?
Spott ( https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spott/id591300005 ) is exactly what you're talking about.
It's basically nearby anyone, with the connection being a location instead of a phone number, email, username, etc... They have done a good job at keeping the content focused on useful information, rather than dick pics.
The downside is it really only has a strong user-base in Chicago.