Simple Facebook Hack | Hacker News Reader

Simple Facebook Hack

4 pointsprojectred10 comments

Check who is looking you up on Facebook.

- Login to Facebook.com - "view source" - Ctrl-f. search "InitialChatFriendsList" (Hit enter until you come across a long list of numbers) - Copy the first one and paste it after facebook.com e.g: facebook.com/123456

This is the person who has viewed your profile the most, second number is second most, and so on...

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I almost never use facebook chat (IM) at all, and this list is almost certainly not the people who view me the most. The 5th person who came up was someone I hadn't spoken too since we friended each other 5 years ago.

That being said...if someone knows a way to actually find out who has viewed you most, i'd love to hear it.

How would you know "who has viewed your profile the most, . . . the second most, and so on" through any other means to verify that that is the ordering principle being used here?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

This is your chat friends list on the right side. How they're ordered. They're ordered by people you interact with most. It is not who views your profile the most. This information wouldn't be stored in JavaScript...

The second one in my list is a fake account from a friend that hasn't used it in years, so not sure how accurate this 'hack' really is.

Nice find. I would say people that I have interacted with most recently. I saw someone in my list, close to the top, that I haven't interacted with for a long time, but they would be interested in links I have shared, so could be incorporating views along with other things.

Could be possible to reverse engineer this list with some fake profiles.

Not really. These are most likely the people you interact with the most. That way the chat list can prioritize who is most important to me. While profile views may be a factor in determining the list, it is most likely who you chat with the most, who you post to the most, etc.

I don't know what the order is, but it's definitely not the people that viewed my profile the most.

Not exactly true. It is the same algorithm that finds the people you are most likely connected to, considering profile views, similar likes, and connections (like family, working at the same places, etc).

These are the ids of users that are initially loaded into your chat window.

I went through the first and the last ones, and it seems pretty accurate!

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