It’s not a live feature in the recently released iOS 4.3 dev beta, but it looks as if Apple will be adding a new feature to its MobileMe service sometime soon, making it easy to see where your friends — or, at least, their iPhones and iPads — are when they’re late for dinner and drinks.
Spotted by MacRumors, several strings in the new Settings app reference a “Find My Friends” feature.
While it’s unknown what, exactly, this is referring to, the name seems pretty self-descriptive: a service coming to iOS and MobileMe that allows you to locate your friends, a la Google Latitude or Loopt.
That’s pretty cool, and no one’s sneezing at new iOS functionality, but MobileMe’s $99 per year cost isn’t really going to be any more justified than it already is by the addition of a feature that is identical to what Google’s providing with a free app.
MobileMe’s improvements aren’t likely to end here, though: Steve Jobs said that 2011 was the year MobileMe would get “a lot better” and we’re inclined to take him at his word.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
