Few Social Apps to Find Your Friends Easily

Facebook will help you keep tabs on your friends' children, careers and concerts, but it won't tell you when your freshman year college roommate is at the cafe just around the corner, and it can't let you know that that stranger at a cocktail party is actually your sister's best friend.

That's news you can use, and a growing number of social discovery apps are here to help.

These apps marry your online social networks and information about your location to add an additional layer of data to the world around you. Services like Foursquare, Crowded Room, Ban.jo and Sonar are meant to spark serendipitous social connections between you and the people around you, or help you more easily get together with people you know.

Take a look at seven social apps that can help you make friends and the find the ones you already have:


Foursquare

Social discovery apps are only as useful as their users are plentiful, and unfortunately many well-intentioned services lack the critical mass necessary to do what they promise. With Foursquare, you won't find yourself logging on by your lonesome. The service has nearly 15 million users, processes over 3 million check-ins a day and says 50 percent of its daily activity comes from users outside the U.S.

Foursquare's free app allows users to claim discounts and broadcast their locations by "checking in" to places, whether it's a park or a panini joint. The app lets users track their friends' locales (so you can see when Jason checks in at bar just a few blocks over), allows users to save merchants they want to check out on "to-do lists," and creates recommendations for restaurants, museums and more, based on users' own behaviors and their friends' activities. Foursquare users can also redeem rewards for check ins and purchases.

Forecast

Forecast is for what you plan to do, not what you're doing.

Like Crowded Room, but with more limited features, Forecast, still in private beta, provides a quick-and-easy way to tell your friends when and where you plan on going. Thinking about a trip to the museum tomorrow afternoon, but loathe to go alone? Forecast it, then share your plans via Facebook and Twitter. Your Forecast friends will be notified when you've made a future "appointment" on the app, and can comment on the Forecast with tips, reactions and more. The app also syncs with Foursquare to make checking in a breeze.

Sonar

We've all been there: That guy standing in line for coffee looks familiar, and you'd like to say hi, but you can't quite place him. Or maybe you're at a cocktail party at a conference, and even though you know you must know someone there, you're not sure whom to approach.

Sonar promises it can help. The app brings together data from Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as your current location, to help you discover who's nearby and how you know them. Because the app is built on top of existing social networking services, it can more easily bypasses the critical mass conundrum. So long as people keep using Foursquare, Facebook and the like, Sonar should serve you well.

"Sonar is taking the thousands of connections you miss every day and putting them in your pocket," says Sonar CEO Brett Martin. "In the same way that it's easier to talk to someone at a bar than it is on the street and easier to talk to someone at a house party than at a bar, what Sonar helps you realize is that the person on the street is actually the person at the house party with you last night. It uses technology to draw connections."

Find My Friends

The free Find My Friends app, released in October and available only to users with iCloud and iOS 5-compatible devices, marks Apple's latest venture into social networking. It follows in the footsteps of another one of the Cupertino company's failed social media experiments: Ping, a music sharing service that didn't exactly top the charts.

Apple pitches Find My Friends as "the easy way to see where your friends and family are." It offers a way for users to continuously or temporarily share their exact locations on a map with approved users. The app also provides seamless ways for users to message each other, get directions to one another's location and initiate video calls with one another.

Be forewarned that the app is not nearly as polished as Apple's iDevices. Users must log in to the app using their Apple ID, which could cause problems for family members who share a single Apple ID across several devices. The app does not sync with any other social networking sites, which means you have to build out your list of "friends" to find from scratch, a tedious process.