A troop of script kiddies has yet again unearthed some evidence that Apple is indeed working on a social service called “Find My Friends.” Assumed to be tied in with iCloud, we can only assume that the service, with its heavy borrowing of Twitter terminology, will allow us to track the location of people we know, and stalk those we don’t. Presumably said script kiddies could even do as the name implies and find some real friends.
Okay, okay, that was pretty awful. But seriously, check out the strings in these variables, man. It’s totally a dead giveaway.
Okay, so let me be the first to point out that this code is indeed JavaScript, and defend my headline by saying that you would indeed find these lines in scraping through the HTML on a site. Taken from the heavily JavaScript driven website we all know as iCloud, string definitions like this are often used for internationalization, much like the .plist and Localized.strings files found in most Mac desktop applications.
iPhone has a terrific array of sensors for determining location along with the battery to make it worthwhile to enable a service like this without tying you to a wall outlet for half the day (on the bright side, we’d all know exactly which wall outlet…) We all know our iPhones constantly track us anyway. It’s only a matter of time before Apple decides we should have the ability to share it with the world just as many do already with the rest of their boring lives (see: my twitter account.)
Still, no one really knows if this will ever even be released, seeing as it’s only a few lines in a sea of JavaScript powering an application that I barely use. I’m still slightly excited, mostly because Apple has a habit of taking simple things others have done and making them simpler, easier and much sexier, so we’ll see what they can crank out with this one.
