Who Has Defriended You? Facebook's New Timeline Will Tell | Hacker News Reader

Who Has Defriended You? Facebook's New Timeline Will Tell

pcmag.com

16 pointsmsabalau19 comments

According to BuzzFeed, which was linked in the article, this was already fixed by Facebook.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/how-to-find-out-who-has-unfri...

Quote:

UPDATE: Apparently Facebook fixed this “problem” already. Major bummer. This was one of the best parts about the new Timeline!

Well, it's always been possible to see if someone has defriended you. Just search for their name, or click it on someone else's wall post, or whatever.

On the other hand, the idea that facebook will deliberately remind you of people with whom you were once and no longer are friends (for whatever reason) seems unnecessary.

Oh wait, I just read alexdias's comment that they've already fixed this. Never mind then.

Also I don't have this new timeline feature yet.

Uhh, only if you regularly search for everyone you know you were previously friends to, yes.

Also, you can use Better Facebook (http://betterfacebook.net/) and defriend monitoring services to make it more obvious to you.

Heh, no thanks, I'd rather not know.

No problem; just providing some methods that are better than what you had suggested.

I've found that Facebook's friend recommendations are a good way of being able to tell who has defriended you. For years now, in fact.

"... Facebook's friend recommendations are a good way of being able to tell who has defriended you. ..."

how?

Sounds like FB is recommending people he thought he was already friends with, but who stealth-defriended him somewhere along the way.

"... FB is recommending people he thought he was already friends with ..."

That would sound right. Must friend a lot of people not to notice silent drops. FB gives you a numeric number on your friends list.

Or just not care enough about Facebook to keep track of the number - which is the case for me.

Exactly. If I look at the recommended friends page, people who defriended me are often near the top (probably because of the high number of mutual friends).

In this case, "he" is a "she", btw :-)

Can't you already do that? Just look through your wall posts and other activity, and find people that interacted with you. Either they're your friend, or they're not. Is the point of this article that Timeline just makes it easier?

Some people have friended you in the past but have never interacted with you (so there won't be any posts or other activity on the wall). Yes, Facebook automatically posts that 'Sue is now friends with Joe' on your wall but that gets removed when someone defriends you.

Not that big of a deal. I thought at first the article was implying it would tell you when you were defriended, which would be slightly more... irritating.

This is nothing new. You've been able to do set difference on your historical friend data as an FB API developer since the beginning.

huh? how?

do you mean taking historical snapshots and saving them?

right.

dropped = set(friendlist1) - set(friendlist2)

hm, if the only way to find out that someone de-friended you is to see it in your timeline, may be this "friend" is not really a friend for you anyway?

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