Is Facebook's 'Find Friends Nearby' feature cool or creepy?

stalker-cat-watching.jpgFacebook has sneakily rolled out a new feature called ‘Find Friends Nearby’ and we can’t work out whether it’ll be cool and useful or just plain creepy.

As you can imagine, the new ‘Find Friends Nearby’ feature allows you to do just that, find people that are sitting, dancing or scarily staring at you that are in your close vicinity RIGHT NOW.

According to Venture Beat, TechCrunch first spotted the new feature, which you can access inside the iOS and Android apps by clicking Apps > Find Friends > Find Friends Nearby or by visiting www.fb.com/ffn from your mobile browser, but you’ll obviously need your location settings turned on first.

Now this could be a REALLY useful tool if you’ve just met someone and want to add them to Facebook (not that typing in their name is particularly taxing). However, it’s also a bit worrying that if you left the page open on your browser, as you’d be visible to lots of other users nearby until you logged out.

We’ve tried out the feature a few times this morning and although it’s slow to get going, we did manage to locate a few random users, but couldn’t find them in Starbucks no matter how much we stared at everyone’s faces. Hmm, maybe WE’RE the creepy stalkers you should be worried about?!

Obviously ‘Find Friends Nearby’ hasn’t been officially rolled out yet, but it’ll be interesting to see how Facebook launches the new feature and whether the usual suspects will get all whiny about it.

[Via Venture Beat Image via jul13d0wn3s]
Becca Caddy