Quite often Facebook will just go ahead and update their website and mobile applications with a new feature without letting anyone know, but thanks to TechCrunch we now know that they have rolled out a new feature allowing you to find friends near to you, allowing you to add and exchange Facebook profiles with people you have just met on the streets, which I have to say sounds a lot easier I have been in the situation where you go to add someone on Facebook you only kind of know and you find that there’s hundreds of people in the world with the same name making it impossible to find the person you want.

Alongside their report TechCrunch also managed to get a comment from the creator of the new feature, Ryan Patterson who said this about his creation:

I built Find Friends Nearby with another engineer for a hackathon project. While it was originally called ‘Friendshake’, we settled on ‘Find Friends Nearby’ for launch (the URL was a little bit of a homage to the previous iteration).

For me, the ideal use case for this product is the one where when you’re out with a group of people whom you’ve recently met and want to stay in contact with. Facebook search might be effective, or sharing your vanity addresses or business cards, but this tool provides a really easy way to exchange contact information with multiple people with minimal friction.

Via [TechCrunch]