Friends

The Friends functionality in SpotWalla allows users to share their location with other users in a way that goes beyond trips, location pages or anything else. When you establish a friendship with a user you're giving them access to all location data from one of your devices. Secure zones don't apply. You cannot hide locations from a friend or limit the amount of detail they can see.

So if you're not willing to accept this level of exposure with another user, this functionality is not for you. Stick to trips and location pages and such.

Your friends consist of your devices and the devices of users who are sharing their location with you. Your friendships are the users with whom you're sharing your location.

Managing your friendships is done from the Friends Manager. There are a couple of ways to get there:

So whether you click the Friends Manager button on the dashboard or choose the Friends option from the user menu, you're going to arrive at the Friends Manager:

The friends manager has five different tabs. Click a tab to see its content.

• My Friends - Your friends consist of your devices and any those of users sharing their location with you. The table shows you their name, display name, an indicator if they're displayed on the map and actions you can take on the friendship.
• Friendships - Your friendships are where you're sharing your location with other users. You will see the user's name, the device used to establish the friendship, how long you've been a friend and some actions you can take on the friendship.
• Requests - This tab shows your open friend requests. You don't have to respond to a friend request, but from here you either confirm or decline the request.
• Find - Some SpotWalla users have elected to share their name publicly. From this tab you can search for and send friend requests to these users.
• Share Name? - You can choose to share your name publicly with other SpotWalla users. This setting can be found in your Profile. But sharing your name publicly isn't necessary to create friendships.

The friends viewer allows you to see all your friends on a map.

At the top of the view you can click SpotWalla and go back to the home page. If you click My Friends, a dialog will appear with all your friends listed. Click any friend and the map will pan/zoom to their location.

Clicking the button allows you to change the map type. And the button displays a countdown timer until the map is automatically refreshed. Clicking the button will refresh the map immediately.

Clicking any marker on the map will display detailed information about the friend and location.