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Facebook Find Friends Nearby

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51 pointspdufour28 comments

Great, another way for FB to show people I don't know down my throat.

I really don't get it. What does FB have to gain from me friending a million users? I thought the point is to build meaningful connections with people I actually know. But the way they are handling things is just stupid. The "people you may know" widget on their page (web&mobile) has never ever suggested a person I actually knew. Just some random friends of my friends that I've just friended, or sometimes not even that. Can anybody shed some light on this?

the more poeple you're friends with the wider the audience for the sponsored stories/news thing

But that becomes useless if I'm friends with people I don't know!

I think they cater to both types. They want to make existing social connections stronger but they also want to create them.

I think it makes a lot of sense for Facebook to implement a feature which lets you friend people physically near you. There have been people I have never talked to but simply seen around who I found on Facebook and became friends with in real life, but otherwise wouldn't have without Facebook.

This form of social interaction may not interface well with yours, but it doubtless does for others. Given that Facebook's business model is to appeal to as many people as possible, and features like this don't cause any notable quantity of people to discontinue using the service, it makes sense.

Maybe this feature isn't obtrusive, which is nice. But having a random stranger on-top of my news feed every time I open FB on my phone is getting really really old (people you may know).

I personally think that it really sucks to post links that require registration. It's just like those links "free what ever" and then they ask for tons of personal details. No, it isn't free at all. This is something I have commented several times in LinkedIn. It's promotion & data-grabbing, it isn't public or free. So in this case, I would give -10 points to this link.

Eh, it's actually just like free stuff they mail you, you only pay $29 for handing and posting costs.

Here is an article about that feature that you can read without registration: http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/24/friendshake-facebooks-new-m...

Uh-oh, lookout, it's a Highlight killer! Just like how facebook killed foursquare (fb check-ins), quora (fb questions), Craigslist (fb marketplace), and whatever it is they were trying to kill with fb credits, now they're coming for Highlight.

Might as well give up now, Highlight. You're doomed.

Does Highlight require a Facebook account?

It does...

Hate to be that guy, but can someone mirror or copy-pasta the post to people without a Facebook account?

Screenshot would do, too.

It would be nice if not only paywalled but also login-only resources were frowned upon on HN.

I agree. Plus there are people who are browsing HN from behind a corperate firewall that blocks Facebook, are stuck in the dark as well.

Edit: Sami_Lehtinen posted the link lower down!

What would you suggest? A screenshot of the resource would be even less accessible for the majority because like it or not, I'm sure 90% of HN users do use Facebook.

This is a major feature that deserves a place on HN frontpage (especially compared to some other recent posts) and shouldn't be ignored just because it's behind a login screen.

Browsing from work? Browsing from an anon'd browser?

Even if we assume your 90% figure isn't like 68% of statistics (made up on the spot), there are still other reasons why a screenshot might be more appropriate.

Facebook has taken their app offline: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/06/facebook-quietly-rele...

In the mean time, a company called FriendThem announced they are contemplating legal action against Facebook because they feel their idea was stolen: http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/25/friendthem-sues-facebook-c...

Which made me think this idea is too simple to sue each other over. I wrote a clone in about half a day yesterday (the link above). For those interested in the technology, it's made with Python, Bottle.py, Gevent, MongoDB, CoffeeScript and JQuery Mobile. Code is here: https://github.com/allards/connectnearby

A live version is here http://connect.othercircles.com

The app would be much more useful if you could connect on Linkedin, Twitter or with a vcard as well. NFC would be perfect for this. What do you think?

For finding people who aren't nearby, I recently built Who Will I Know There [1]. Using facebook's search tools to filter friends by location was a huge pain in the ass; this is better.

[1] http://wwikt-peterldowns.dotcloud.com/

This is a really great project. You should totally promote that as much as possible.

It may be one of my extensions blocking it, but it should be more clear that this uses Facebook. If they allow, maybe include a Facebook "F" in the submit button.

Thanks for the feedback! Glad someone liked it :) You're right that it should be more clear that this depends on Facebook — I'll take a look at that.

Is this something Facebook made, or a user created app?

Ryan Patterson, an engineer at Facebook, "built Find Friends Nearby with another engineer for a hackathon project." See his comment on the Techcrunch article on it:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/24/friendshake-facebooks-new-m...

Nice. I similarly built streetbooking.com (which I think is broken because of some api changes) for the same reason. This sort of thing comes in handy when you meet people for the first time with common names. Good luck finding them through the native people search.

So happy I quit, now I don't feel like my life is under surveillance. They are a surveillance company.

Uhh, did you read the page? It says:

  People who appear above are nearby and have this page open.

This isn't a constant list of whoever is nearby. It's a list of nearby users who have this page open. It's intended for two people to be able to easily friend each other when out in public. They just take out their phones, go to this page, and click on the user.

I was talking about Facebook. Have they stopped allowing people to post pictures of me without my consent?

They allow you to screen any tags of you before they're made public (e.g. Someone tagged you in a photo, allow or deny?) - this only covers whether or not a tag of you appears with the photo (or check in).

Unfortunately, Facebook can't stop people from uploading a photo containing you (but neither can Flickr, or Photobucket, or imgur, or any other photo sharing website or service).

I don't know what "234*527" is off the top of my head, but I know what the answer is if I need it. Imgur doesn't know who I am in a picture and wouldn't know the answer if they needed it (except for a massive & deliberate effort). Facebook, knowing my social graph, and knowing there is an untagged face in a picture, it is a trivial programming problem.

This is why I prefer privacy-by-design rather than privacy-by-policy, and why I think cryptography is awesome: I want to make these problems arbitrarily hard. :-)

People can upload photos of you without your consent to hundreds of photo sharing services. If you really have a problem with it, don't let people take pictures of you in the first place.

On Facebook you can turn on tag review which means you have to approve tags before they are published. The photo still gets published, just without you tagged (until you approve it).

Others have already addressed your question, but I want to make an additional point:

Anyone can still upload photos of you to Facebook... even if you don't have a Facebook. That's not an issue that can ever be fixed in a reasonable manner (short of face detection -- which dabbles with censorship).

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