You ask for something that's basically impossible with the current Facebook, but is exactly the kind of thing you can do with the new Graph Search capability fi you have it. Me? I don't yet, so here's the best solution I could come up with, a search that lets you identify a list of Facebook users in the specific area that -- I believe -- are either your friends or friends of your friends.

The good news is that it's really easily to identify who is who on the final list so with just a tiny bit of work you can indeed build up a list of people who are your Facebook friends and are located in a specific geographic area. Or at least report that as their location! With the increasing lack of privacy on Facebook I'm starting to find people are deliberately obfuscating aspects of their online identity...

But let's start at the beginning. Facebook search. Even though there are over a billion searches on Facebook each and every day, I think a lot of people don't realize that the input box at the top of the page is a search engine, not just a way to jump to your favorite fan page or group.

So that's the starting point. I'll do a search for friends who live in Boulder, Colorado by typing "Boulder" into the box. Type in the word, but don't press Return...

If you look more closely at the bottom entry, you'll see the link to click on for our search:

Click on "See more results for..." then look on the left side of the resultant page to see the rather impressive number of different categories of results available:

We're doing a people search, so click on "People" from the list and not only does a list of people in that geographic area appear, but the advanced search tool filters appears at the top too:

In this case, I'm already Facebook friends with Andrew and Doyle, so they show up as "Friends". If there was someone who matched but wasn't a friend, the link would say "Add Friend".

Click on "Add another filter..." by the way, and you'll see that there at least some interesting options available:

Still, this is all curious because sometimes when I do the filtered search for people in a specific geographic area, I only see friends listed, and below I'll see a section marked "People you might know" and more results. Other times, friends and "Add Friend" people are intermingled.

Maybe that inconsistency is why Facebook graph search is coming to the forefront right now. And as for me? As soon as I have access, I'll be writing about what it is, how to use it, and what interesting capabilities it offers us users.