Soon you may be able to use your mobile device to see which of your Facebook friends is geographically nearby.  Well, at least that is the subject matter claimed by Facebook’s recently issued patent entitled “Systems and methods for automatically locating web-based social network members”.

Claim 1 recites:

A method of sharing locations of users participating in a social networking service at a geographic location, the method executed by a computer system and comprising:

receiving location information and status information from a mobile device of a first user of the social networking service, the location information representing a geographic location of the first user, the status information manually provided by the first user on an input module of the mobile device;

associating the location information with the status information of the first user in a database; and

sending the status information and the location information of the first user to a second user for display.