The Facebook Stalking Tool
Posted by Nick O'Neill on May 13th, 2008 2:35 PM
So a bored individual sent me an email yesterday notifying me of a small glitch in Facebook that lets you see who you are stalking. I hadn’t tested it out until this morning but it may just be accurate. My profile showed up 5 individuals who I apparently stalk regularly. One of them is Caroline McCarthy, three other of them girls and one guy who’s a friend of mine. While I don’t know what the equation for determining who you are stalking is, it is definitely interesting.
It appears to have some sort of moving average because I’ve been stalking a few people recently who did not show up in my results. If you want to check out who you’ve been stalking, head over to the search box and click the down arrow two times. If that doesn’t work press up twice and it will eventually display. Facebook apparently knows about people stalking other users and this is a great way to see who you’ve been stalking.
So who have you been stalking lately?
Update
Apparently I wasn’t clear enough on how to do it. Here it is:
Step 1: Go to Facebook
Step 2: Click inside the Facebook search box
Step 3: Click down down on your keyboard. If that doesn’t work press up up.
The people you are stalking will now appear.
Update 2
Facebook is going to remove the “stalking tool”. Here is their response:
“Facebook tries to surface the people we think are most important to users to make it easier and faster for them to navigate the site and find what they are looking for. The search drop down is not a list of those that have searched for the user. It is also not a list of people whose profile the user has viewed the most or who have viewed the user’s profile the most. To avoid any confusion, this will no longer appear.”
Update 3
I’ve been able to get it to work by using the spacebar in the search box. Anybody else having similar results?
(4.64 out of 5)
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5/5 correct!
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I never really noticed it myself, but once I checked it out I saw that 4/5 were correct.
I also thought for a second that it would have been pretty cool if these were the girls most often viewing my profile.
I can dream...
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Find a Group with only one member (probably the creator) but whose profile you do not have access to.
The Related Groups box will show you a selection of their groups, which you're not supposed to know!
Not the worst privacy breach, although that depends which groups you've joined...
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I've noticed this feature this past week as well. It was meanwhile cancelled, due to your interference...
It was just introduced last week. My thesis is that it was part of a new search tool, which shows the people you have searched for the most. (Meaning if you went to their pages through links they will not be included here).
This change came with another change (which now disappeared together with this feature) - when you search for friends and type their name, the ones you typed most often in the past came up first, as opposed to alphabetically.
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