One of the questions I’m often asked when it comes to smart phones is how to find someone’s location on Facebook Messenger. When I look at the location on my phone, I instantly get a feeling of uncertainty. The location sensors in high end smartphones are not as robust as they should be, and that uncertainty leads me to believe that there are other ways to find someone’s location on Facebook Messenger. Fortunately, there are!
In my earlier review of the iPhone 4, I wrote about the lack of “geofencing” in the software package. GeoFencing was a great way to limit where your customers could go on your Facebook pages. That meant that only their friends could go into certain areas of your page. Now that the iPhone has a higher-end Retina display, people’s locations can be more accurately pinpointed. You can see someone’s location within a few feet of their statuses.
One of the main uses for Facebook Messenger is for in-person interactions between groups of people. If you’re a teacher, and a student in a class uses Facebook to post homework assignments, there’s a good chance that you will see this person’s location. So you can check to see if she’s actually at her desk in the classroom. It’s easy to tell how far away she is by the location light that comes on when she posts a status update. But how do you find someone’s location on Facebook Messenger?
There are actually two ways to do this, and both of them are a lot easier than searching for Facebook’s current location via search engines. One method is the older method of typing in the URL and hoping that something shows up. For example, if I wrote the name of a restaurant, and I wanted to check whether it was online, I could try the Google search engine. Even if the restaurant did have an address, chances are that it wouldn’t be located in my local area. So my preferred method is to use the Facebook Messenger’s “find people” feature.
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To use the “find people” function on Facebook Messenger, simply go to the home page and click on “gear.” This will take you to the “Find People” page. Here, you can type in someone’s location and the interface will prompt you to choose how you’d like to find the person – first name, last name, state, city or anywhere in the world.
It’s important to make sure that the location you want to see is actually displayed on the map. To do this, click on “oryx”. The resulting drop down menu will allow you to see where this person is currently located. When you click on a location, a pop up window will appear with information such as the city this person lives in, their employment, age, etc.
If you want to send a message to someone’s location, all you have to do is copy and paste the text from the “find people” link. After this, click on “send”. A messenger client will appear and you can now send a message. However, there’s one problem here: sometimes people change their locations without sending a message. If you want to ensure that your friend knows how to find you, then use the “set location” function and re-type the message.
If you need more detailed information about the location of a friend, then use the “search” function. Here, enter any information that you think is correct and click on “search”. The resulting list will include places where this person is known to you – college, workplace, place of employment, church, etc. If you only know their location by an email address, just type it into the “find people” box and click on the “search” button. This way, you can save your searches for future reference.
