Facebook on Monday appeared to have quietly unveiled a new feature
designed to let people see which Facebook users are nearby at any given
time.
By Tuesday, however, the feature seemed to have been pulled from the Internet.
The company called the
feature "Find Friends Nearby," and on Monday it was available through
Facebook's mobile apps and website despite the fact that it hadn't been
formally announced.
The blog ReadWriteWeb dubbed the feature
a "stalking app" because it could open people up to potentially awkward
or threatening interactions with strangers on the social network who
know you're nearby.
To test out the feature on Monday, Facebook users could go to fb.com/ffn
in a browser, or follow this path in the Facebook's mobile apps: menu
> apps > find friends > other tools > Find Friends Nearby.
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Facebook
users had to opt in to the feature by going to that site, otherwise
their profiles would not appear in a list of people who are nearby.
The blog TechCrunch first reported on the feature
Sunday after a non-Facebook developer tipped off the site to the
feature's existence. In a comment on that site's post about the new
feature, Facebook developer Ryan Patterson, who says he developed Find
Friends Nearby, described how he hopes the app will be used:
"For me, the ideal use
case for this product is the one where when you're out with a group of
people whom you've recently met and want to stay in contact with.
Facebook search might be effective, or sharing your vanity addresses or
business cards, but this tool provides a really easy way to exchange
contact information with multiple people with minimal friction."
A Facebook spokeswoman declined to provide additional information.
"We are constantly testing new features but have nothing more to share at this time," she wrote in an e-mail to CNN.
Reactions to the news were mixed in the tech blogosphere.
The site Gizmodo found the new feature to be potentially useful -- and dangerous.
"You meet a cute
somebody at a concert, you're like, 'Hey, we should be Facebook
friends,' and they're like 'OMG, totes!' Then rather than having to
spell your names and search around, you've got a much smaller group of
people to choose from. I guess that's great, right?" Brent Rose wrote on that tech news site.
But Rose added: "Sure,
it'd be great to easily add a contact quicker, but imagine this: some
creeper has been molesting you with his/her eyes all night. She opens
the app, can kinda recognize your face from your profile picture, and
now said creeper knows (your) name and possibly some of your personal info."
That would be the downside.
Others said the app simply isn't ready for prime time.
The blog Engadget called the app "fairly primitive," and The Next Web said
it amounts to "nothing more than a parlor trick at this point" since
other location-based friend finders haven't caught on with the general
public despite their buzziness in tech circles.
Facebook recently acquired a company called Glancee,
which did something similar to the Find Friends Nearby feature. So
there's speculation that the company's technology may have contributed
to the new Facebook feature. Patterson, however, the Facebook developer,
wrote on TechCrunch's post that he created the feature during a
hackathon.
Other similar mobile "social discovery" apps
include Highlight, Banjo and Sonar. Some of these apps will also show
you nearby friends of friends or even strangers who share your
interests, based on your social-network profile.
It's unclear exactly how
much information the Find Friends Nearby feature gave away. On Monday,
users had to log into that site intentionally to see a list of people
who are nearby, and that list of people appeared to be quite limited.
Also to be determined is
how large of a radius the feature employed. Did it search for people
who are within eyeshot of you? Or within a mile?
Let us know what you
think in the comments section. On Monday, we weren't able to interact
with anyone -- friendly or otherwise -- who was nearby.
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