Names of my Facebook friends have been blurred to protect the innocent.
By Helen A.S. Popkin
Facebook "apps" that claim to reveal who stalks your Facebook profile most are usually scams that trick you into spamming up the profiles of your Facebook friends. There is a way, however, to find out whose Facebook pages?you loiter on most?? a bit of code that ranks people according to who you're most likely to search for.
Mind you, while the code is on the customer side, in the browser, where we Facebook civilians can see it, it's designed for the Facebook algorithm that autocompletes names you're searching for or tagging in posts or photos. Hacker News contributor Jeremy Keeshin came across the file, dubbed first_degree.php, while he was mining Facebook's inner workings for tips on speeding up autocomplete on his rating website Ranuk.
"Facebook gives explicit numbers to the directed edges (connection going from you to your friend), about how much they think you are looking for this person," Keeshin writes in his blog.?"Although you already know who you look at most, it is eerie to see the list they have come up with ? and the numbers they give. The more negative the number, the more Facebook thinks you are looking for them."
Ordinarily, running weird code on your Facebook profile is not recommended, but this one seems fine to us and the many others who have tried it. Keeshin posted?a bookmark on his blog post so you can drag it to your Firefox, Safari or Chrome browser bookmark section. (Go here to get it.) Once you have it bookmarked, go to your Facebook profile, then click the bookmark. A list of your most wanted should appear.
Note: If you've got your Facebook profile locked down with https (which you should), you'll have to disable it to use the feature via Account Settings > Security> Secure Browsing.
As Keeshin notes, the code seems?to factor?whose profile you visit most, who you interact with and who you've most recently friended. For example, I found someone near the top of the list whom I've just friended even though we've never really interacted. As such, the list changes as your Facebook habits do, and you may actually be surprised with how your friends are tallied. In fact, you may find it totally random.
"The inputs to this ranking function explicitly do not?include other users' behavior on the site," Facebook developer Keith Adams?emphasizes in the Hacker News forum, one of several forums where he addresses this discovery and the obligatory privacy panic that follows any new discovery of how Facebook works. Adams also points out that no one else can see your rankings unless they are logged on as you.
Note:?You can prevent people from stealing your credentials and logging in to your Facebook account and seeing who you Facebook-stalk most by enabling the https setting on your Facebook account. You can keep your parents/spouse/roomates from seeing who you stalk most by logging off when you walk away from the computer.
No doubt you've got way more embarrassing stuff to worry about on your Facebook profile than how the Facebook algorithm ranks your friends. If anything, the first_degree.php code reminds us how Facebook limits our world.?Even if you have more than 250 Facebook friends, you only see the posts from?the people with whom you interact most, so it's easy to forget about those people you'd still like to hear from, even if you don't interact that much.
According to Facebook, you can change the limited number of friends who show up in your Newsfeed by scrolling to the bottom of your profile and clicking Edit Options. In our own experience, as well as the anecdotes we've heard from Technolog readers, this doesn't result in much of a mix up. You're better served repeatedly clicking on the profiles of the people you've fallen out of touch with.
via TechCrunch
More on the annoying way we live now:
Helen A.S. Popkin?goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her to get a real job on Twitter and/or Facebook.?Also, Google+.
leighton meester kelly osbourne kelly osbourne john boehner cbs sports lauryn hill us postal service
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.