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Last update: 11:10 a.m. PT

Facebook's new feature that helps users discover who's around them is a stolen idea, according to a company that's been offering a similar service for the past year.

The chief executive at Friendthem, a service that shows users others who are nearby based on geo-location, says that his company got there first, and even discussed the idea with a company executive earlier this year.

"I was amazed on Sunday to read that Facebook is blatantly stealing our idea with what they are calling, 'Find Friends Nearby,' Charles Sankowich, Friendthem'… Read more

Facebook has quietly launched a new mobile feature that allows people to locate other Facebook users who are geographically nearby.

Find Friends Nearby allows users to locate and add new friends at events or locations without having to search for them by name. However, it requires users to be logged into Facebook as well as the FFN platform.

First reported by TechCrunch, the new feature hasn't been officially announced but is currently operational on iOS and Android devices, as well as the general Web.

When contacted for comment about the new feature, Facebook was tight-lipped.

"We are constantly … Read more

If you have a digital camera -- or maybe even if you don't -- you know all too well how easy it is to end up with a hard drive cluttered with duplicate images. Fortunately, there are lots of programs designed to help you identify and delete duplicates, freeing up valuable hard-drive space. Similar Picture Find aims to help with this tedious task, but it's definitely not as easy to use as some similar programs we've tried.

We weren't immediately sure what to do with Similar Picture Find. While most programs of this sort simply want … Read more

Duplicate files can take up a lot of room on your hard drive, and they can accumulate faster than you might expect. Importing and renaming images, inadvertently downloading files twice, and other run-of-the-mill activities can result in a computer clogged with files you don't need. Fortunately, there are plenty of programs out there that can help you root out and delete duplicates. PackIt is a basic rendition of this software, with some useful features and a few drawbacks as well.

PackIt's interface is quite plain, and it wasn't immediately clear how to get started; there was an … Read more

Protecting yourself from identity theft starts at home, and the first step is to secure your own computer and the personal data it holds. Identity Finder Free is a powerful tool that scans your PC for unsecured passwords, credit card numbers, and other personal data and gives you the option to shred, secure, recycle, or ignore the scan's findings. It's free to home users on their personal systems. The full version searches for more data and also searches e-mail, compressed files, and removable drives, offers advanced options, and disables ads.

Identity Finder Free's installation wizard includes the … Read more

According to a patent application filed by Apple (found by AppleInsider), the Find My Friends app for iOS devices may soon be getting new features that allow users to create custom settings for the amount of information friends can find about their location by adjusting the precision of the GPS locator.

Find My Friends was launched alongside the iPhone 4S in October and features the ability for users to share their location with friends and family who they approve. While the feature is a great solution for many, some prefer a little more privacy control.

Enter the "Variable Precision … Read more

Find A Word is a simple but challenging word game that's also a lot of fun to play. This jumble variant presents you with a list of random letters, including vowels, and you have to make as many words out of them as you can before your turn is up without using any proper names, contractions, abbreviations, or words not on the program's approved list. Turns can be 30, 60, or 90 seconds long.

Find A Word's interface is basic but designed very well for the job. It starts with Start Game and Start Turn buttons at … Read more

Once upon a time, duplicate files were so evil that no expense and effort was spared to hunt them down, terminate them, and erase every trace of their existence. Hard drives grew, and duplicate files became less of a problem. Then came digital cameras, MP3s, and video, and suddenly duplicate files are once again threatening to take over the world, but today's duplicates are sometimes bigger than entire hard drives were back when dupes were space-sucking villains.

Fortunately, the duplicate file finders have kept pace, and today's tools are far better than yesterday's at identifying and filtering … Read more

Twitter has again tweaked its iPhone and Android apps, reviving a few "high-demand" features that were jettisoned from the previous versions, as described yesterday in Twitter's official blog.

Both apps have brought back the swipe shortcut. Swiping a tweet in your timeline now displays the toolbar of icons that let you reply to, retweet, share, or view the tweeter's profile all without having to exit the timeline.

And both versions have added a new alert to the "Find Friends" feature. Now when you tap on the feature at the bottom of the Discover tab, … Read more