Facebook Introduces “Find Friends Nearby” or FFN Feature

Update (25-Jun-12): This feature has been removed by Facebook

Facebook has created a feature that is not widely known (yet). It is called “Find Friends Nearby” or FFN for short. What it does is very simple. Based on your location, if you enter this FFN feature, those people who are nearby that are accessing this FFN feature will show up.

As expected, at the hour I am trying this feature, nothing shows up. Contradicting to the name, it does not find your friends nearby. In fact, it is trying to find people who are nearby and also accessing this page.

Here is how you can access this feature.

On Mobile

I am using Android version of Facebook app to explain.

  • Click on Menu after starting Facebook app.
  • Scroll down to “Apps” and click on ” Find Friends”.
  • Click on “Other tools”.
  • Click on “Find Friends Nearby”

That is it. Have fun. BTW, it is available on Android and iOS but NOT available on Windows Phone.

On Web

You can also use this feature on any browser.

According to TechCrunch,the original Facebook engineer,Ryan Patterson, responded in the comment

I built Find Friends Nearby with another engineer for a hackathon project. While it was originally called ‘Friendshake’, we settled on ‘Find Friends Nearby’ for launch (the URL was a little bit of a homage to the previous iteration).

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.

Well, I guess if you are bored, you can have some fun with it. This is not something new. If you search around, you can see many sites or apps having similar features (Feecha, WNM and etc). However, nothing is near the number of users that Facebook has.

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