As Facebook has grown in scope, determining where in the world a friend or colleague is has become increasingly challenging. A quick hack called Where They At has liberated location-based data and placed it on a map for easy browsing.
It's all very simple: a user logs in with Facebook, agrees to sharing friends' location data, and the service populates a world map with place pins of recent check-ins, shares and updates. Clicking around the map on each place pin will reveal the person's name, and click off-site to the relevant content.
For this reporter, the service has already proved useful to learn of some unexpected locations of colleagues working on stories.
The ability to browse social content on a map is much improved for travel-minded people, as the accuracy is not always great when scrolling through a stream of updates that an algorithm has determined are most relevant. Oftentimes location is a much more compelling and revealing reason to explore shared content.
The web app was created by Eli White, who found difficulty in keeping tabs on friends during his current extended travels.
Check it out here and more on Eli here.