Facebook adds location sharing feature

Facebook last week, added location sharing to its multiple social networking features to known as Facebook Places.

Announcing, the chief executive officer, Facebook, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg said last Tuesday that the company’s latest creation, a foray into the world of location-based services called Facebook Places, reports PCWorld.

“This is going to be a really fun and interesting summer,” said Zuckerberg, stressing that they have got a lot of new products coming out.

First of these new products, he said, is Places, a smartphone-based service that takes on much of the functionality provided by existing services such as FourSquare and Yelp.

According to him, Facebook Places has been designed to facilitate three main objectives including helping people to share where they are in a social way, see which friends are nearby, and discover nearby places and new places through friends’ profiles.

Also speaking, Facebook product manager for Places, Mr. Michael Sharon, while demonstrating the service’s capabilities noted that most of the functionally seem identical to the features already popularised by FourSquare.

Through an updated version of the iPhone app or by browsing to touch.facebook.com on a mobile browser, he said, users would find a main menu that shows nearby friends and offers a list of nearby places to check into, of which the friend could write about the Places feature in the Facebook blog.

The report also indicated that by choosing a place from the list and tapping the “check in” button to check in, or tap the plus symbol to add a new place, and users will see a security notice explaining that they’re about to share their location.

In addition, he said, the service includes the ability to tag friends who are in the same location and check them in at the same time because, explaining that not everyone has a smartphone that supports Places yet.

In light of recent concerns over Facebook user privacy, the company made a point of highlighting Places’ security features.

By default, check-ins is visible to friends only, though this setting is customisable to allow broader sharing or to restrict it down to just a few specific people.

Users will only be able to tag people who are on their friends lists, and then only when they first check into a place. This ostensibly limits the chances of mischief with the service, particularly because the only way to check a friend into a potentially embarrassing location will be to check oneself in as well.


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