Facebook has always encouraged you to share with your friends — your favorite movies, pictures, and life updates. Now Facebook wants you sharing your location, too.
Facebook's newest feature, Nearby Friends, begins rolling out today. The opt-in feature broadcasts your exact location, and can even give real-time updates as you move around, if that's the kind of thing you want to share with your friends.
The new feature is opt-in, meaning you'll need to activate it within the app, should you choose to participate. Users who do not activate Nearby Friends won't be affected in any way, and will not share with or receive any location information from others on the platform.
How to use Nearby Friends
- To see friends in your area, turn on Nearby Friends in settings within the mobile app. This feature is opt-in, meaning you must manually activate it if you want to be seen (or see others). Once the feature is activated, you'll go through a small tutorial that explains how to use the feature.
- You can select the groups on Facebook with which you want to share your location. You can't share your location with the public or with friends of friends. You can only share it with friends or other groups that you have created, like "close friends" or "family."
- Facebook will notify you when friends are nearby, at which point you can message those friends if you want to connect. You won't be able to see a friend's exact location, however. For example, the app may say that a friend is within two miles, but the exact coordinates will not be shared automatically.
- If you turn on Nearby Friends, it will not turn off automatically. You will continue to broadcast your approximate location until the feature is manually turned off. Users be reminded that they are sharing their location thanks to push notifications, says Vaccari
The new feature is intended to help friends meet offline, says Vaccari, whose startup Glancee was acquired by Facebook back in 2012. Vaccari, who grew up in Italy, was building similar technology at Glancee in order to meet new people, a challenge he faced when he came to the United States. At Facebook, the technology only applies to a user's friends, which Vaccari believes will encourage more people to try it out.
Facebook has been testing the feature with the "vast majority" of the company's 6,500-plus employees for close to 18 months, according to Vaccari. During that time, Facebook used employee feedback to shape the feature and hone the notification algorithm. At the beginning, users received notifications that they had friends nearby all the time, says Vaccari.
