Where are (and were) your Friends?

I have just uploaded my latest web app which allows users to visualize their Facebook friends on a Google Map, either by current location or hometown. Friends can be filtered by friend lists.

I’m sure has been done many times before, but I enjoyed developing it. Finally got to toy with a Google API, and was pleased to find their documentation helpful and thorough.

One of the tricks here was to create a locations array to collect all the users in each location:

locations[location.id] = arrayOfFriendsInLocation

After that’s populated, you only need to add one marker per city and lump all the friends in that city in an infowindow that displays when the marker is clicked.

Interesting note about the Facebook Graph API: I was able to pull a list of all friends with my choice of fields, but when I tried to request a list of friends from a specific friend list, I was limited to only a few. Not sure why they would restrict it like that…