It's not really scriptable, but if you look at the network traffic you can "copy as curl" one of the URLs that pop up as you're playing with "Find My Friends" on icloud.com and paste it into a terminal. It will return a JSON blob with geo information of all of your friends.

I don't know how long the cookie that "copy as curl" grabs lasts, but if it's long-lived I can absolutely see dropping it into a little script and feeding the lat/long into a static Google Maps tile URL.

I was so intrigued with the idea of this, and didn't quite find anything I liked, that I whipped up a javascript version of this for use later. It's minimal at the moment, but it works: https://github.com/jziggas/node-icloud

there are loads of github repos for this, i just grabbed one and was on my way.

Agreed that was probably the most interesting tidbit for me to read in the article. I never considered using Slack integrations for personal use cases but it was nice to read about it here.