Among all the hype (or distinct lack of it compared to when Steve Jobs was around) of the iPhone 4S launch yesterday one feature has been mostly overlooked by the tech pundits even though it has the potential to be one of Apple’s biggest moves in to the social space yet. It’s called “Find my friends” and as Apple says it helps you…
Meet up with friends at an outdoor concert. Keep track of the family during a day on the ski slopes. Or see when your out-of-town guest has finally made it past baggage claim. The Find My Friends app is a great way to share your location with people who are important to you. Friends who share their location with you appear on a map so you can quickly see where they are and what they’re up to.
Now the service does have some serious limitations (you need an iOS device to use it) but unless I am clearly missing something here this is a social network. You connect with friends in very social ways and I can’t see a difference between this and the likes of Facebook or Foursquare. The technology is nothing new but the fact that this is baked in to all Apple phones is absolutely huge. The big question is does it remain a small niche feature to help parents watch their kids or do Apple get it some traction and build it in to some huge social network at the core of iOS.
Privacy Concerns
It wasn’t that long ago that Apple got in to a spot of bother for tracking all our iPhones and this sort of product will always have privacy concerns. In fairness to them though they seem to realize that given that people will be sharing their physical location the settings need to be incredibly clear. This seems to be done correctly and there shouldn’t be any concerns in fact it might even be the exact opposite with people happy to be able to find each other.
Can Apple Win At Social Networking?
If you look at their previous efforts with the likes of Ping then no. This is different though because it’s not being positioned as a social network and crucially it’s in the very hot space of mobile and location based services. Who knows how people are going to use this but with it being baked in to every Apple phone and tablet it will certainly gain some traction. Having said that the flip side is that being restricted to Apple only makes it very limiting and that might just be it’s biggest downfall. Had Apple been able to do a deal with Facebook to include their social graph in to this sort of product it could have been a huge hit. It will certainly be an interesting one to watch develop and see how Apple grow it over time.