You'd have thought something like Facebook's new feature, "Nearby Friends," in which users can track how far they are from friends in order to possibly meet (or simply take note), would have been invented before something like "Cloak," in which users track certain "friends" so they can avoid them. To be fair, location apps have been around long before both of the recently mentioned ones. "Nearby Friends" might be the best of them all, Tech Crunch reported.
An important part about Nearby Friends is that, for now, it's an opt-in feature (meaning it has to be activated by the user). Thus, your friends will only know where you are if both you and them scrolled through Facebook's "more" tab and activated the app. For further privacy, you can select the friends with whom you want to share location information.
Another key feature is that it gives proximity before exact location. Similar apps from other companies focused more on location, which wasn't always easy to track and something people weren't always comfortable to disclose. Nearby Friends allows you to share your exact location with specific individuals only after first seeing their proximity data. If, for example, you notice you're less than a mile away from a friend, you may want to share your exact location as the impetus for a convenient social call.
The app still needs some tinkering and it's going to require a mass following before it catches on, but it has the potential to be the best of the bunch, according to Tech Crunch.
"Personally, I've already found Nearby Friends useful to see which friends were at a concert, and who lives in my neighborhood to grab brunch with," wrote TC's Josh Constantine. "I'm looking forward to trying to use it to meet up with friends in SF's Dolores Park, one of the use cases that it's creator and former Glancee CEO Andrea Vaccari tell me inspired the feature."
