Today Facebook starts rolling out a new feature called NearbyFriends with optional Real-Time location sharing. Facebook users will have the ability to share their precice location with a selected group of friends. So you cannot find out the exact position of all your Facebook friends.
However, the idea of location positions of your friends next to you already exists in a few apps. To just state a few; bglobol, sonar and glancee which has been bought by facebook in 2012. Actually the most sophisticated application in my eyes is bglobol. It has an attractive design, simple interaction and it’s just fun to play with - compared to the others.
Privacy and functionality
Facebook got smarter in security user-friendliness. The app cannot be activated for Facebook users that are younger than 18. And it’s straight forward to activate or deactivate the location based service, as showen on the image below.
Further the feature also allows you to see where your friend/s are actually travelling (see image below). So a real-time location sharing functionality. Very similar to Apple’s location based service Friends.
Conclusion
Other location based sharing apps like Foursquare or Google Latitude havent really reached ubiquity in the past few years. We’ll see how it works with Facebook. Neverthless Facebook has a huge advantage - it’s users are already there, using Facebook and all of their friends are also already stored. So the expense costs are very low for Nearby Friends. Facebook definitely has a good starting point in constrast to it’s compititors.