Is ‘Find My Friends’ Apple’s New Location Service? [iOS 4.3 Beta 1]

Find My Friends

It’s amazing what you can find when you go digging through iOS betas, and version 4.3 beta 1 is no exception. MacRumors has posted a screenshot of settings for a new feature called ‘Find My Friends’ that appear to be related to MobileMe. Is Apple getting ready to enter the world of location-based checkins?

Apple obviously has the ability to do something along the lines of Foursquare or Gowalla since it can already track an iDevice using MobileMe’s Find My iPhone feature, so presumably most of the hard work has already been done.

The question is will this possible new feature be more like Google’s Latitude than a tradition check-in system? What makes Google’s offering different is the way it continually runs in the background, updating your location automatically meaning the data is never old, the locations are always accurate. Whether you like that idea or not very much depends on how you feel about your privacy but that’s the topic for another blog post at another time.

So what do you think? Are you ready for a Latitude-like service with the spit and polish of an Apple app?

Hopefully we’ll get more info in iOS 4.3 beta 2.

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