Facebook and Foursquare Launch Ambient Proximity Apps

After years of trying to market exact coordinate check-ins to the public, Facebook and Foursquare are turning their attention to ambient proximity, Techcrunch reports. Facebook launched its “Nearby Friends” feed earlier this month and Foursquare has announced its new app, “Swarm.” Both apps employ ambient proximity, which involves sharing your approximate location with close friends automatically, instead of making the conscious decision to post your arrival at an exact location.

Ambient proximity’s appeal is in the fact that users are not required to follow their friends’ every move to know whether or not a spontaneous meeting is possible. Foursquare and Facebook’s ‘Places’ app relied upon check-ins and ambient location sharing that has really never caught on with the public. Despite being the biggest name in the location sharing game, Foursquare only has about 45 million active members, at least as of December 2013.

The problem with exact location tracking is that it feels voyeuristic. Knowing the exact location of your friends becomes unnecessary unless they are close enough for you to join them. Location tagging in Facebook became useful for photo and status tagging, but not for arranging actual meetings with friends. Similarly, Foursquare has become best suited for users looking to discover new local establishments, not spontaneous meetups.

The logical problems with check-ins and ambient location are now apparent. Knowing exactly where someone is does not let you know exactly what that person is doing or whether they wish to be disturbed. They would still need to be contacted to see if it is convenient to meet up, which would nullify the value of knowing where they are in the first place. Because ambient proximity focuses on how physically close someone is to you, as opposed to their exact location, it may remove some of the feelings of voyeurism from the exchange. And because it is automatic and tied to only certain individuals, the assumption would be that the people nearby want you to know when they are nearby.

To read more analysis of “Nearby Friends” from Facebook, and Foursquare’s “Swarm,” read the original article over at Techcrunch.