Question

Using GraphAPI, I see you can request location of a specific friend, or search for friends by criteria.

However, I couldn’t find a way to search for friends in my area. I want to perform a search and get a results of friends who are in a radius of X meters from me.

I know I can fetch each friend manually and check its location, but it seems a bit inefficient so I’m looking for a batch search,

EDIT: I’ve found a similar question (and answer) using FQL: facebook fql query similar to friends checkins

Answer 1

Well, you partly answered yourself there…

When you query about a user friend, you get his location as well since it’s part of the User object (assuming you have the right permissions of course): http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/

The problem, as you wrote, is that you’ll need to send a request to facebook per friend, which is not the right way to go about this.
Thankfully, facebook already thought of that and they came up with the “Batch Requests”: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/batch/ which let you do exactly that.

EDIT

Now that I think of it, it’s simpler than I wrote before, you don’t even need the batch requests since you can get all of the user friends in one request to: me/friends.
Assuming you have the user granted you the needed permissions each user object in the friends list will have the location object as well.

For each friend calculate if his location is in the desired radius.