Facebook adds new Nearby Friends feature to engage mobile users
Facebook has spent a lot of time recently talking about anything but Facebook. Instead, the company has spent billions buying technology and developing new apps separate from the Facebook service. But on Thursday, the social network announced the first significant feature for its core product in over a year.
Called Nearby Friends, it lets users see which of their Facebook friends are in physical proximity to them.
In recent months, the social network has been focusing on other brands: the messaging service WhatsApp or the virtual reality goggle maker Oculus, two companies that Facebook bought this year for more than a combined $20 billion. There's also the news reader Paper, the first real not-Facebook app that the company built itself through an internal effort called Creative Labs.
