This article was published on November 10, 2013

This script shows you how Facebook ranks all your friends


This script shows you how Facebook ranks all your friends

Have you ever wondered how Facebook ranks your friends for you? The company keeps a score for everyone you interact with on the social network.

This affects the order of results when you start typing a name into the search box, the people that appear on top in your Friends pane when someone visits your profile, whose content shows up in your News Feed, and pretty much any list that displays who you interact with on the site. To put this in layman’s terms, Facebook tracks who you interact with or stalk, and vice versa.

As a result, Facebook users are often curious to know how the service ranks their friends. Many people have created tools to list these figures, and Arjun Sreedharan‘s is one of easiest to use.

You can check your friends’ rankings in just three steps:

  1. Drag and drop the following link to your browser’s bookmarks bar: FB Friends Ranking
  2. Login to Facebook and click on the bookmark.
  3. You will see a list of your Facebook friends’ ranking score (scroll down past the “undefined” entries).

The first 15 entries of an example ranking score look like this (names have been blocked out to protect the innocent):

fb_rank

As Sreedharan explains, the smaller the friend’s score, the higher the rank:

The score gives an indication of the length of the edge between you and the friend. I guess only facebook would know what it exactly means

In other words, unless you’re a Facebook engineer, this number is meaningless by itself. It is only useful when compared to your other friends and/or people who you interact with on Facebook.

See also – Facebook is tweaking its News Feed ads algorithm to consider user feedback, including what you report or hide and How Facebook’s Entity Graph evolved from plain text to the structured data that powers Graph Search

Top Image Credit: Manjunath Kiran/Getty Images

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