Tag: Find Friends Nearby

Facebook Kills “Find Friends Nearby”

Well, that was fast. Facebook has pulled their new Find Friends Nearby feature. Introduced over the weekend, Find Friends Nearby allowed users to easily add people near them to their friends list. All you had to do was open the website on your phone’s browser (or navigate to the Find Friends Nearby section of the iOS or Android app) and have the people you wanted to friend do the same. Now, though, the new feature is dead, almost before it had the chance to live.

In a statement to ABC News yesterday afternoon, Facebook insisted that Find Friends Nearby had been rolled out as a test. “This isn’t a formal release,” they said. While some tests get formal rollouts, others don’t. They promised to “communicate to everyone when there is something to say.” So there you have it. It was just a test that either wasn’t supposed to go live for everyone, or didn’t make the cut for some reason.

There may, however, be more to it than that. As we told you yesterday, not all of the attention Find Friends Nearby attracted was positive. The CEO of Friendthem insisted that Find Friends Nearby was a shameless ripoff of his company’s product, an app that allows users to make location-based Facebook friend requests. In fact, as Friendthem CEO Charles Sankowich told WebProNews, he believes his company has a strong legal case against Facebook and plans to pursue the matter in court. He cited “dinner with a senior executive, multiple traded emails, and Facebook’s discussion of a ‘hack-a-thon’” as evidence that Facebook was deliberately copying Friendthem. He declined to discuss the specifics of the evidence, citing a desire not to “litigate this matter publicly,” but insisted that “we have a strong legal case.”

If Friendthem’s case is as strong as Sankowich claims, then suddenly Facebook’s quick removal of Find Friends Nearby looks a lot different. If the product is too similar to Friendthem, then Facebook was wise to take it down. On the other hand, as we noted yesterday, Facebook’s version appears to have been born out of Glancee, another social discovery app that enabled location-based friend requests, which Facebook acquired some time ago. Sankowich insists that Glancee and Friendthem are very different services, though, and that Find Friends Nearby is clearly a ripoff of Friendthem.

Sankowich is very confident in his company’s case and seems determined to proceed with legal action. We’ll keep you posted on how this plays out.

June 26, 2012
CEO Says Facebook Stole His Idea, Expects to Sue Very Shortly

Over the weekend, Facebook rolled out a new feature called Find Friends Nearby. It enables you to discover people around you and make new friends. It sounds like your basic social discovery functionality (the huge trend at SXSW this year).

According to Friendthem CEO Charles Sankowich, however, it’s just a rip off of his company’s idea and trademark. Sankowich gave us the following statement:

I was amazed on Sunday to read that Facebook is blatantly stealing our idea with the idea they are calling “Find Friends Nearby.” Facebook engineer Ryan Patterson claims the feature was born at a hackathon as “Friendshake,”, but we believe they simply stole trademarked materials of friendthem.com

More than two years ago we trademarked “Friend them” and have had tremendous success and exposure with this concept. In February I was invited for dinner with a Facebook senior executive – and now we see that Facebook is up to their old tricks again.

Even their language is similar to what has been on our website for a few years – “Friendthem is a location-based mobile app designed to help you make connections with people near you. Use the Friendthem app to follow up on missed connections for work and personal.”

We are consulting attorneys and assuming this is true expect to commence a lawsuit very shortly. One would think that Facebook would have learned to play fair after being through the mud previously with legal difficulties – but now they are doing it again.

We may not be billionaires but we are damn tough New York entrepreneurs – and we believe in this idea and will keep working to connect people.”

Friendthem describes itself:

Location-based Friend Requests – Imagine you meet someone at a party, a conference, or even out for a walk. This could potentially lead to a date, a new job, or just a great friendship. As you part ways, this person says “Facebook me” and then disappears. Friendthem is a location-based app which helps you find that person and send a friend request.

Facebook, and founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg are certainly no stranger to accusations of stolen ideas, but this seems like a pretty loose idea, similar to functionality of other apps, like Sonar, Glancee and others, and frankly, something that Facebook would have done anyway. As a matter of fact, you may recall that Facebook acquired Glancee, which has been around since 2010. The acquisition, according to Facebook, is the basis for the feature.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment, and will update accordingly.

June 25, 2012
Make New Friends With Facebook’s Find Friends Nearby

Facebook rolled out a new feature over the weekend designed to help you make friends with the people around you. The new Find Friends Nearby feature went live first as a mobile web page, but was quickly rolled out to the iOS and Android versions of Facebook’s mobile app.

The feature, originally called Friendshake, was developed by the team behind Glancee, an app that helped users connect with the people around them. When Glancee was bought by Facebook, the app’s three developers went to work for Facebook and shut down Glancee. Now it looks like Glancee’s features have been rolled into Facebook’s apps.

Unfortunately, the name “Find Friends Nearby” can be a little misleading at first glance. It sounds an awful lot like a feature Facebook already has – the ability to see who’s checked in near you – combined with a feature Apple rolled out with iOS 5 last year – the Find My Friends app. Find Friends Nearby isn’t about helping you find the people you’re already friends with, though. I guess Facebook figures your smartphone has plenty of options for doing that already (you could even… call them). No, Find My Friends is about making it easier to add new people to your Friends list.

Say you get invited to a party by a friend. While you’re there you discover that your friend has pretty good taste in friends, and you’d like to connect with some of the people you’ve met. Usually that involves having each of them tell you their name (and, if they’re anything like me, spell it for you) and sending friend requests one by one. While these new people you’ve met might be cool, they may not be cool enough to be worth all the hassle. That’s where Find Friends Nearby comes in. If you want to add five people, you just have them all go to fb.com/ffn on their phones (you do the same, of course), and it will pull up a list of the people around you. Then you can add as many of them as you want.

As noted above, you can do the same from your iOS or Android device’s mobile app. There are a few more steps involved in the process, but the result is basically the same. Go to the Apps section of your menu and tap Find Friends. You should have two options – Find Friends on Your Phone and Other Tools – above a list of people you may know. Tap Other Tools. There you’ll see a whole lot of ways to find new friends – your city, your home towm, your workplace, and so on. The last item on the list should be Find Friends Nearby:

Tapping that takes you to basically the same screen you see if you use the mobile website instead. Which means that until Facebook streamlines the feature a little, the only reason to use the mobile app instead of the webpage would be if you’re not signed into Facebook on your phone’s browser. In that case, navigating through the menus to get to Find Friends Nearby might be more convenient than typing in your password, especially if your password is long and complicated.

While a lot of the apps out there for locating friends or getting in touch with the people around you can seem a little stalker-y, this one is actually pretty handy. The process of adding several new friends at once can be a real pain in the… thumbs. It’s nice to see Facebook doing something to make users’ lives a little easier.

[H/T: TechCrunch]

June 25, 2012