Now, with the latest version of Banjo available Thursday, the app is emphasizing the ability to visit distant places and experience those locations vicariously through your friends and their social connections. Instead of just focusing on what’s around, Banjo is trying to take people to new locations and give them a view on the ground of what’s happening.

“With this, we’re thinking about how we could emotionally connect you to things you actually give a damn about,” Patton said. “This kind of technology is a springboard to make thing possible that haven’t been possible before.”

Banjo was one of the many location-based people discovery apps at SXSW in Austin this year, telling you when your friends are nearby. The app, along with others like Highlight, capitalized on the person’s FOMO, or fear of missing out. Banjo has gained decent traction since its July 2011 launch (it now has more than 3 million downloads, up from 1.5 million in May), and in its initial version it notified you when friends were nearby, gave you a map of activity happening in your area, and let you view activities from other social networks.

My colleague Ryan Kim wrote in May about the company’s decision to launch on iOS, Android, and the web, instead of just iPhone, and to only broadcast location-based information that users were publicly sharing. He wrote that Banjo’s decision to pull in data from other social sites alleviated the “empty room” phenomena that many new social networks face:

He said Banjo has caught on with users because it first allows users to see other people they follow or are friends with on a variety of social platforms, not just users of Facebook but also Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Instagram, Vimeo and Google. Users can get alerts when their friends are nearby. Banjo allows users to view other people around them based on their public check-ins, tweets and activities. That has made the app useful right from the start, instead of plopping someone into a lonely first-time experience. And users don’t have to give away their location just to see what’s going on around them.

The update to Banjo will continue those features, emphasizing the friends-of-friends connections. So if a friend of your Facebook friend posts something in Paris, you can see how you and that person are connected, a la LinkedIn connections. And users can search by places on a new app homepage (which looks very much like the Instagram photo maps, but with social activity of your friends in those places instead of photos.)

The map feature is well-designed, and capitalizes on the FOMO impulse, for people who want to see what their friends are doing elsewhere and experience it second-hand. However, for the plenty of people who don’t frequently wish they were elsewhere, and are uncomfortable sharing location-based activity, it still seems unclear what Banjo adds to the equation, aside from aggregating and organizing all your friends’ social network activity in one place. But Patton argues that it’s not about aggregating, but rather creating a database of social activity that could be used for a variety of purposes.

“You have to look through the prism of the future,” he said.

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Newspepper.com founder Hermione Way.

The debate as to whether location-based apps are creepy took a new turn Monday, when Newspepper.com founder Hermione Way asserted that women have been raped as a result of location-based apps “like Facebook and Banjo,” and Banjo CEO Damien Patton responded that “more people have been harmed by the Catholic Church” than the popular social networks.

“Those were just baseless accusation against location apps in general,” Patton said.

Banjo CEO Damien Patton.

The two clashed Monday on a panel discussing privacy at Monday’s Social Loco conference, where Way opened by saying she has chosen to live her life online and give up assumptions of digital privacy, but that not everyone is completely aware of the consequences of such a lifestyle. The panel prompted strong responses from audience members on Twitter throughout the event.

Way accused apps like Banjo and Facebook of being responsible for assaults on women, referencing the recent news of sexual assaults in connection with a social app called Skout. She said she’s worried about the impact of a constantly-sharing society as young children grow up with websites like Facebook without understanding the implications of their sharing.

Afterwards, Way said she “might have exaggerated a little,” about the safety risks posed by social networks, but that she feels strongly that users should share their data carefully and consider their own privacy before sharing online.

Patton sharply denied Way’s comments, saying that Banjo works hard to protect user privacy. He noted that Way could not specifically cite the instance when social apps caused individuals harm, and said the positive aspects of social apps like Facebook are generally a positive development for people, even if there are unfortunate instances of abuse by some users:

“Any good in the world has opposing force,” he said. “She was trying to make it sound like it’s out of control.”

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