Find Friends Application of IOS5

When Apple recently launched their latest operating system (IOS5), it came with a cool application called "Find Friends". The concept of this application is that you get your friends and/or family members to opt in to your Find Friends application. By doing so, you will always be able to find out exactly where they are (or at least their phone is), and it will bring up a map as well as directions on how to get from where you are to where they are.

In theory, this is a very cool application. It requires all your friends to be on an Apple IOS5 device. For non-Apple users, you can get similar functionality out of Google Lattitudes., an application provided by Google and downloadable from both the Android market place as well as the Apple App store. That application, Google Latitudes, is very similar to Apple's Find Friends application but won't be talked about any farther in this article.

So after getting over the initial excitement of using the Find Friends application, you start thinking, why would I ever want to let anyone know where I am at all times!!! If you think about it, it's kind of creepy.

I would imagine most people would be similar to myself, in terms of the euphoria of getting a new device and using a new application. I immediately asked a colleague who also recently got an iphone4s to accept my invitations to the Find Friends application, He too was interested in seeing the application work so he accepted a temporary invite, a feature in the application which will allow you to specify a time period where you agree to be located. Over the next two weeks, we were able to see everywhere each of us went. I can't say that it was very exciting. For the most part, we were either a couple of aisles away in the office, or I saw him at his home and he sold me at my home. Regardless, it was cool to be able to show others how exactly the app worked by being able to show where each other was.

My teenage son, also bought an iPhone4s and he was no different than me. When he first got it, he gladly accepted my invitation to Find Friends, which really surprise me. This turned out to be a great parenting tool as he had his license and was always out. By simply entering the Find Friends application, I was able to track where he was and where he was going at all times. Don't take this in the wrong way, I'm not an overbearing parent or anything like that, but you have to admit, the ability to know where your kids are, especially late at night, is a pretty comforting capability.

I could literally watch the dot on the screen move down the road on a map while he was driving his car home from school or to a friends house.

Well, that didn't last too long. He very quickly made himself unavailabe to me when it actually hit him that I can always find out where he was!!

So what is this application really used for? Unfortunately, a few days after its launch, headlines appeared about a guy that used the Find Friends application to spy on his wife. He called her and asked where she was, and she told him she was downtown (Manhatten) at her girlfriends. The Find Friends application showed she was uptown where the man whom he suspected she was cheating on him with lived. That information was used as evidence in their messy divorce case. Unfortunately, this situation of spying on a cheating spouse or significnt other is a key use for this application.

So after reading this hub, hopefully I have you thinking along the same lines as me. For what real purpose is the Find Friends application. Unless as stated above, your spying on a significant other, after the first week or two of curiousity, you'll probably never use this application again.

So Apple definitely packed alot of great content and functionality into their ios5 operating system. (To see more on IOS5, see Apple iOS 5 Overview ). These capabilities came along with the introduction of the iphone4s. What People Like and DisLike about their iPhone 4S will provide a great overview of what iPhone4S users like and don't like. From all this, I'm still struggling to find out the need for Find Friends.