Facebook Messenger releases new location-sharing feature Locating your Facebook friends in real time just got easier.
The Menlo Park tech firm said Monday that it’s adding a new feature to its messaging app that allows users to share their live location for up to an hour. The feature also allows your friends see how long it will take you to get to them by car.
“Many of us make plans on Messenger that involve finding each other, or letting friends and loved ones know we’re on the way. Sharing your location will also help some of you feel safer on the way home,” wrote David Marcus, Facebook’s head of messaging products.
Selena Wang, a product manager for Messenger, wrote in a blog post that Facebook has been testing this feature for a while.
“People tell us that Live Location is helpful when trying to coordinate with friends, telling people how close you are when you’re on your way to an appointment, or even sharing where you are with your roommate when you’re on your way home at night,” she wrote.
Other companies including Google have been adding location sharing to their apps, allowing them to capture even more valuable data about users. As reporter Ethan Baron wrote last week, Google Maps also released a new tool that lets users share their whereabouts.
Other apps such as Life360 and SafeTrek let you track the location of friends and family members, too.
And in 2015 a developer created a tool called Marauder’s Map — a reference to a magical document in the book series Harry Potter — that allowed Facebook users to track a person’s location using the company’s messaging app data. The tool was disabled, though, after Facebook claimed the developer scraped data in a way that violated its user agreement.
Facebook’s Messenger location-sharing feature is rolling out globally and is available on both iOS and Android. The app has 1 billion users.
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