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Hands-On With Facebook's 'Get Friend Map'

05.10.2011
If your Facebook feed has been flooded with mentions of the , an app that visualizes the locations of your Facebook friends on a world map, you're not alone. As of this writing, the Get Friend Map--which sounds like you'll be --has 580,767 monthly active users and over 60,000 "likes" on its page. So what is the Get Friend Map? And how useful (or harmful) is it?

What is it?

The app's page describes the Get Friend Map as: "View your friends connection around the world on a beautiful map." (Note: the app creator's English is quite broken, so to save time, I'll just leave out all the sic notations.)

In order to accomplish this, the Get Friend Map collects location data from your friends' profiles and uses a representative glowing dot on a very dark world map to show the far-flung nature of your social network.

How Accurate is it?

It's as accurate as your Facebook friends are honest. If they aren't lying about their location--such as my friend who claims to reside in but who actually lives in a weird-smelling studio apartment in Boston--the dots on the Get Friend Map appear to be accurate.