Think Facebook knows a lot about you from all the information you enter into the site? Well it now appears that Facebook may soon know a lot more than you thought. In the past few days Facebook added a new feature on the Friends page which enables you to view “Friends without Facebook Profiles”. I checked it out and Facebook seems to think that none of my friends aren’t on Facebook. While inaccurate, I’m not sure if I am relieved to see that Facebook doesn’t know which friends aren’t registered.
So how does Facebook mysteriously determine which of your friends aren’t on the site? One theory I have is related to photo tagging. Frequently, users will tag other people in photographs that haven’t registered for the site. My guess is that if you end up in enough photos with that unregistered user, they will be added as a friend not on Facebook. Another theory I have is related to Facebook’s new Facebook Connect feature.
When you login to a site outside of Facebook with Facebook Connect, the external website has the ability to pass back all of your friends that you are connected with on that site. In turn they pass back all of the email addresses and names of your friends. If that email address hasn’t been registered on Facebook they will show up in your friends list as “Friends without Facebook Profiles.” Do you have any other theories about how this shows up?
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Creeeeeeeeepy.
Comment by Andrew Feinberg — July 26, 2008 @ 12:53 pm
- school/university/ college year lists (from assigning colleges/unis at network or in the define field (as people there for a few years they might have the +/- x years from you which match- also friends of friends- network buddies (in particular work, school, college and university- note/photo/ video tagging (including who the friends of friends tagged)- facebook connect- going around your day to day life and stalk you with 'detectives'
Comment by Jamie — July 26, 2008 @ 1:15 pm
To add to what Jamie said:-other network info you enter on your profile (delicious, flickr, digg, etc)-Gmail/Yahoo/AOL credentials you give them when looking for friends-FOAF, XFN
Comment by Jesse Stay — July 26, 2008 @ 2:45 pm
It also shows up when you create an event listing for names that are not on FB.
Comment by Christian Cadeo — July 26, 2008 @ 4:32 pm
Creeeeeeeeepy.
Comment by Andrew Feinberg — July 26, 2008 @ 4:53 pm
- school/university/ college year lists (from assigning colleges/unis at network or in the define field (as people there for a few years they might have the +/- x years from you which match
- also friends of friends
- network buddies (in particular work, school, college and university
- note/photo/ video tagging (including who the friends of friends tagged)
- facebook connect
- going around your day to day life and stalk you with ‘detectives’
Comment by Jamie — July 26, 2008 @ 6:15 pm
I initially thought that was a joke they put up temporarily. That is,"trust us, you don't have any friends who aren't on Facebook"or"if they're not on Facebook, they're not your friends."No idea what it actually is, though.
Comment by Konstantin P — July 26, 2008 @ 6:40 pm
To add to what Jamie said:
-other network info you enter on your profile (delicious, flickr, digg, etc)
-Gmail/Yahoo/AOL credentials you give them when looking for friends
-FOAF, XFN
Comment by Jesse Stay — July 26, 2008 @ 7:45 pm
You can email people from "Compose message' in the inbox. I'll bet that they collect the email addresses of any non-FB users that you've messaged.
Comment by Mike Winters — July 26, 2008 @ 7:56 pm
It also shows up when you create an event listing for names that are not on FB.
Comment by Christian Cadeo — July 26, 2008 @ 8:32 pm
It is pretty simple. It lists people I have sent an invite to, but have not registered yet. The feature is a little buggy, one of this friends has registered and still appears in the list without name, but with his profile picture and status.
Comment by Mark — July 26, 2008 @ 10:43 pm
I initially thought that was a joke they put up temporarily. That is,
“trust us, you don’t have any friends who aren’t on Facebook”
or
“if they’re not on Facebook, they’re not your friends.”
No idea what it actually is, though.
Comment by Konstantin P — July 26, 2008 @ 11:40 pm
In addition to everything that has already been mentioned, they could also potentially mine all those contacts they scrape from Gmail. Y'know, after people hand over their Gmail passwords to go scrape them from Google's servers. And of courses all the other places they import contacts from.I think the most likely to actually show up there though would be people that were invited but haven't registered.
Comment by Charlie — July 26, 2008 @ 11:51 pm
You can email people from “Compose message’ in the inbox. I’ll bet that they collect the email addresses of any non-FB users that you’ve messaged.
Comment by Mike Winters — July 27, 2008 @ 12:56 am
It is pretty simple. It lists people I have sent an invite to, but have not registered yet. The feature is a little buggy, one of this friends has registered and still appears in the list without name, but with his profile picture and status.
Comment by Mark — July 27, 2008 @ 2:43 am
In addition to everything that has already been mentioned, they could also potentially mine all those contacts they scrape from Gmail. Y’know, after people hand over their Gmail passwords to go scrape them from Google’s servers. And of courses all the other places they import contacts from.
I think the most likely to actually show up there though would be people that were invited but haven’t registered.
Comment by Charlie — July 27, 2008 @ 4:51 am
@mark this could be because he has used a different email as he registered and not the one you have used for the invitation.it is also possible to send emails via the facebook messaging system to non-facebook members. Those people appear there as well.
Comment by Chris — July 27, 2008 @ 11:03 pm
oh I have to correct that: they don't appear in my list yet, it says "you have no friends who are not on facebook"
Comment by Chris — July 27, 2008 @ 11:06 pm
@mark this could be because he has used a different email as he registered and not the one you have used for the invitation.
it is also possible to send emails via the facebook messaging system to non-facebook members. Those people appear there as well.
Comment by Chris — July 28, 2008 @ 4:03 am
oh I have to correct that: they don’t appear in my list yet, it says “you have no friends who are not on facebook”
Comment by Chris — July 28, 2008 @ 4:06 am
Yea I got the same thing, "You have no friends who are not on Facebook." and I know that's NOT true!
Comment by Charnita Fance — July 28, 2008 @ 12:19 pm
Yea I got the same thing, “You have no friends who are not on Facebook.” and I know that’s NOT true!
Comment by Charnita Fance — July 28, 2008 @ 4:19 pm
It's disappeared now!
Comment by Matt Manley — July 29, 2008 @ 9:53 pm
It’s disappeared now!
Comment by Matt Manley — July 30, 2008 @ 1:53 am