But given the inability to zoom in to see individual cities or states (or have any interactive features at all), your resulting photo is likely to be a messy blotch of your close-by friends, which explains why, on mine, New England looks like an irradiated wasteland on a nuclear heat map.

How Safe or Spammy is it?

In order to install the Get Friend Map, you need to grant it a bunch of permissions, including your name, gender, networks, user ID, and list of friends. You also have to allow it to post status messages, notes, photos, and videos on your behalf.

That may sound overreaching and malicious, but the Get Friend Map only collects information that you have made public--and all of .

Brad Phaisan, the app's creator, assures users that the Get Friend Map won't go crazy with your information. One user asked why the app needed photo permissions, and Phaisan replied that the Get Friend Map "needs the first permission to post the result image on user's wall on user behalf," but that "since some user may not actually hit a share button in our application ... application won't post anything and hence don't need the first permission at all." Basically, it's a Facebook thing; common to many of the site's add-ons.