With over 1 billion users engaged on Facebook, this company is really in position to market and leverage the huge user base to its liking. Facebook is said to be working on a new smartphone app that will track location info of yours and will notify you if your friend is in neighborhood. So, it’s like ‘Find friends nearby‘ feature provided by this app. Since, we do not know the purposed name of this app nor we have full details on what else this app is expected to do, we can’t predict how useful this app will be for its users. According to a report (courtesy: Bloomberg), the team working on the development of this mobile location tracking app consists of engineers from Glancee and Gowalla (the former was acquired by Facebook in May, while the latter in December, 2011), led by Peter Dang (he joined FB from Google in 2007, also known for his work on Messenger). Once installed, the app will always run in background so it’s kind of Always-on service like Google’s lattitude, Apple’s Find my friends.
Mobile-first has been the motto of Facebook. Of late, Facebook had launched ‘Poke’ app for iOS, Facebook Messenger with mobile number based registration support like Whatsapp and is incessant on its effort to launch more smartphone apps. For this purposed mobile location tracking app to be successful, it will take more than just ‘location based friend finding’ feature. Maybe, it’ll provide attractive location-based deals as well. Who knows, Facebook may go into local deals/voucher business as well. Such app/service opens door to lots of possibilities for Facebook, but for users, it is major concern of privacy. Unless, Facebook promises something of real and more rewarding benefit to users than just friends’ location tracking, it may not capture attention of most users. One more possibility of such app is that it can be used for finding your phone if in case it is lost, because the app is always-on kind of service. It may even include auto check-in to popular facebook places and deeper integration with FB places including option for submitting reviews after check-in/out, deals/voucher alert, weird or panic situation alert, lost phone tracking apart from friends finder feature. Moreover, the app has to be battery friendly to win scores of installation. Stay connected with us for more news!
