This may be a bit too much…

Social media is an important facet of our daily lives, but the trick to putting it to good use is to find the right balance between what you share and what you don’t share. Companies and brands should share everything they want their customers to know. Normal, everyday users should be a little more judicious.

That’s why Facebook’s new tool may be sharing too much. On Thursday, the social media giant will launch “Nearby Friends”, a feature of their app that will allow you to broadcast your exact location to all your friends. Your precise coordinates will be available to anyone who has also opted into this entirely voluntary service.

The purported purpose of this service is to help users engage in real life, offline. As with the rest of Facebook, the privacy settings can be customized to your liking, sharing what you like with whom you like. However, this leads into the realm of oversharing. For the most part, I don’t want to know where my high school classmates are, and if I did I’d ask them where they are. In my profile, this feature will probably collect dust, rarely if ever used.

But then what if it becomes a trend to have this feature activated? Because then Facebook knows where you are at all times. And are we sure we can trust these large entities with the minutiae of our daily comings and goings? It’s a small measure of privacy to be sure, but a valuable one as well. Time will tell how this feature will end up shaping the user experience.

What Sparks Our Fire: Awareness of the coming trends, and taking care not to share too much.

Do you feel comfortable with this new feature?