On Friday Facebook announced that it was bringing a new feature, Nearby Friends, to the mobile app for iOS and Android. The feature would allow you to get information on your friend’s current location (although it wouldn’t be exact locations by default). You’d then get notifications if your friends are near to you. The feature is opt-in currently, and it’s unlikely that’ll change in the future.
If you want to meet up with your nearby friends you can send an exact location through a message. Your exact location would only be sent to selected friends. It’ll automatically update, but when you initially share your exact location Facebook will ask you how long you want friends to know where you are. It can be turned off whenever you want.
It’s an interesting concept, but it might be seen by many as giving too much information to Facebook. It also could result in severely reduced battery life, although Facebook claims this won’t be much of a problem since it’s only getting rough location data (by default, unless you send exact data) every 15 minutes.
