Ridesharing seems to be all the rage right now albeit under dominance from companies like Uber and Lyft. While those two mentioned above do tend to take the lion’s share of this industry, a new patent discovered over at the USPTO belonging to Facebook suggests that the social media giant may be looking into creating a ride share feature of its own to integrate within the social application. With Facebook’s size it would be more than possible for them to take at least some portion of the rideshare market simply because of the amount of users they have as well as the brand awareness.
According to the patent drawings, Facebook’s rideshare feature would not work quite like Uber though, so even if they do introduce it, there is likely still a chance it may not affect Uber on a massive scale as Facebook’s option would rely only on friends and friends of friends. Ther way that it would reportedly work is that Facebook could integrate it right into the events page. When someone creates an event on Facebook a new option would appear in the drop-down menu where users respond with whether or not they’re attending. The option would be called “going and driving,” and should anyone post to the event using that response Facebook could then send them a prompt which inquires on if they could drive other people who are also attending the event and if so, how many they could fit.
It’s also displayed that users could opt to invite other event goers on their own outright with an invite button, and there’s even a space for listing where the location is that you’ll be departing from to head to the event. If you live in a larger city where public transportation is more common and available, this could potentially be an option as well for stating how you’ll be getting to wherever the event is, with Facebook making attempts to pair you with another attendee who is using the same form of transportation. Whether or not this is something that Facebook will actually implement at some point is not known, but having the option there certainly makes sense, as friends or friends of friends might often travel together to go to the same place. Having the ability to set up a carpool so to speak from within a Facebook event page would also make things simpler and more hassle-free for users.
