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Helping friends find themselves offline has been a huge missed opportunity for Facebook . Be it because the brand is too scary or the feature-sharing feature of the launch campaign with politeness in 2015 was not scary enough, Facebook near Friends Friends has never taken off. Only 103 of my 1,120 friends in San Francisco turned it on.
Foursquare Swarm, Glympse, Apple's real-time coordinate sharing option of Google Maps and Google Maps have failed to become a ubiquitous standard.
The redesigned map of the Facebook home screen close to friends
But last year, Snapchat launched the idea from another angle, based on its largest acquisition, the French Zenly application. With Snap Map, it was not only useful to see a list of addresses of your friends, like on Facebook, but also to browse them on maps on which you could dive to see their latest geolocated stories. It was as much fun and content as spending time with people in person.
Now, Facebook is testing a significant redesign of Friends nearby that looks a lot more like Snap Map. It replaces the list of neighborhoods and cities where your friends are by a map grouping them by city. A "Show List" button opens the old Home screen, even though in both views you can only see the approximate location of a friend in a neighborhood or a city , not their exact coordinates. Facebook confirms to TechCrunch that "We're testing a new design for nearby friends, a tool people have been using for four years to meet their friends in person. People have complete control over the use of nearby friends or not. They can activate it in the Friends bookmark nearby. "
This statement subtly promotes the privacy setting of Facebook's involvement for close friends while urging users to turn it on. The screenshot was generated from Facebook's Android application code by mobile researcher Jane Manchun Wong, a frequent TechCrunch journalist. Interestingly, after the TechCrunch survey, Wong tells me that Facebook seems to have disabled the server-side ability to access the map feature.
The reason it counts, is that Facebook is desperate for engagement, especially among younger users who escape to Snapchat and Instagram. If they are rearranged with this map and other improvements, nearby friends could become a more popular utility allowing users to open their Facebook account. Making more people share their location in real time could open up new opportunities for targeting local ads. And Facebook could take advantage of showing that it is opening up significant offline connections, considering recent issues related to its brand following election interference and calls saying it's the opposite "time well spent".
The existing design of Facebook near friends
Snap Map was smart, but it is unfortunately hidden behind a pinch gesture from the Snapchat home screen or in the search bar where some users did not expect it. Taylor Lorenz's internal Snapchat usage data for The Daily Beast revealed that Snap Map had grown from 35 million viewers every day after its launch in June 2017 to only 19 million in mid-September, only 11% of Snapchat users at the time. Users never seemed to stop using it to navigate Snapchat's geolocated content.
Unfortunately, none of these location applications understood that meeting was not about location. It's a question of availability. It does not matter if I see that my best friend is immediately in a cafe, if they are not really available to go out. They could be up to date, have a work meeting or try to work. If I pass just because I see that they are nearby, it could be embarrassing. You must first send them a message, but you may look hopeless if they can not or do not want to meet you.
Location applications need an availability indicator similar to the green "online" point used by many chat applications. You can enable this option if you want to show that you are interested in a moment of spontaneous friendship.
Facebook actually spent last year trying to integrate this into Messenger as "Your Emoji." It allows you to choose an emoji, such as a martini, a fork and a knife, or a bar that is temporarily superimposed on the thumbnail of your profile to let people know that you are drinking, to go have dinner or do some exercise. This feature has yet to be extensively tested, indicating that Facebook has not quite succeeded in encouraging encouraging online dating.
Ideally, Facebook would associate Proximity Friends and Your Emoji to help users indicate both where they were and if they wish to keep in touch. The next step is to let you easily view a friend's geolocated Facebook story, no matter where it is. And then, Facebook could copy more Snap Map by making public the stories and other geolocalised content accessible from the map so you can browse it for fun instead of the News or Stories menu.
Nevertheless, for nearby friends to work, it may be necessary for Facebook to rethink the privacy element. The friends chart has swelled to include family, coworkers, bosses, and distant acquaintances with which users might not want to share their position in real time. Finding a better way to allow you to share your position with your closest friends could make more people comfortable with this feature.
Facebook needs to rethink its entire product stack to incorporate high-definition cameras, large phone screens, and fast network connections that make it easy to transmit information through images or text. Visual communication is the future, and it goes well beyond Stories.
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