A question for Facebook, with my answer

Note: If you have a question on how to set a custom username, see How To Create Custom Username (URL) For Facebook Fan Page.

From time to time a new application for Facebook claims to present its users the number of people who viewed the personal profile of the person using the application. So, it seems that the biggest question on Facebook is “Who viewed my profile?”

The bad news is that no such application, event, web site can present a good answer to the question, since Facebook’s privacy settings prevent a third party application to providing such an answer.

The good news is  you can use the data provided by Facebook itself to answer the dilemma.

So, how can I know which persons viewed my profile? It’s a slow process, and it goes like this. First of all, use a new Facebook profile (note: creating a new profiles for the same person interferes with Facebook’s terms; so find a solution on this), with no friends whatsoever. Then repeat these steps:

• Go visit a friend’s (we’ll call that person X) Facebook profile; depending on the privacy settings of that person, you may see or not its list of friends;
  • You can’t see the list of friends? The process stops here;
  • On the other hand, if you can see the list of friends X has, Facebook does this trick: it tends to show you mostly the friends X has visited recently; so, if X used to visit your profile page four months ago, but now X is not really interested in your profile page, this data won’t matter; but if X has, in the recent time frame (days, weeks at most) visited your profile page, your profile page will show in the list;

Warnings:

• The data is skewed if you visit X’s profile by using an account which has common friends with X (so if you visit X’s page using your own profile and you have common friends, data might be skewed);
• Out of the 10 friends shown in the friends list, you will also see random users, not necessarily people whose profile X has seen;
• The system is far from accurate, it’s more of a guesstimate; X is “mostly” interested on some people, this doesn’t say all that much;

I consider this issue as a Facebook privacy abuse, so I’ve hidden the list of friends on my profile altogether. I don’t have the wish to show others which profiles of my friends I do visit. On the other hand, I do share other stuff on Facebook.

I also consider the practice of visiting people’s profiles just to see who visits who’s profile intrusive, so I avoid this as much as possible. It’s like an open window – you can look from the street into the house, but it’s not very nice to do so.

You may also want to read:

• How to upload 1,000 photos to Facebook in 30 minutes? – Get a result now!
• Simple trick: how to browse through 100 photos in Facebook fast? – Get a result now!

___________
Bottom line: if you want to know which of your friends on Facebook visit your profile, you can create a new Facebook profile (see the rules first), visit their profile and (if they allow it) see top viewers of other’s profile.

Copy article URLShare on FacebookShare on WhatsAppLinks giving error?