If you’re one of those people who likes to plan those otherwise impromptu encounters, Facebook has just announced a new feature called Nearby Friends.
The premise is fairly simple: Nearby Friends shows you if your friends are close by, so you can reach out to these friends and contact them about meeting up.
The feature isn’t automatically turned on within Facebook’s apps though; users wanting to take up this feature will need to toggle it on and your friends will have to decide to share their location for it to be of much use.
Facebook say that the app has an ability to broadcast coordinates for a certain amount of time within the app. For example, you could set Nearby Friends to share your location for the hour or two that you plan to be at your favorite bar. As part of this, users can also see when their friends who have opted in for this feature are traveling, given the user the ability to discern food, bar or event recommendations with ease.
The feature will also send through push through notifications to users’ mobile devices when your best mate or certain friends are nearby.
Facebook has said the new feature will be available in the US on both Android and iOS over the next few weeks, but no date has been officially confirmed for when or if the feature will come down to users here in Australia.
What do you think of Facebook’s new feature? Would you opt-in to this service or not? We would like to hear your thoughts in the comments below
As much as our location is already shared, I do not like this feature.