You All Are Some Stalkers
Posted by Nick O'Neill on May 13th, 2008 4:24 PMI learned a little bit about human behavior today when rumors started flying about the Facebook stalking tool that I posted about this afternoon. Everybody that I asked had a story and now there is a ton of buzz about what this really is. I’ve checked it out and for myself it is somewhat accurate. For other people it has also turned out to be accurate for the most part.
Within hours, Facebook took down the tool and now you can no longer see who was most relevant to you based on Facebook’s private algorithm. Honestly, Facebook needs to make a more robust stalking system that enables users to track who is “most relevant” to them based on profile views, searches, date and other factors. The bottom line is that all users on Facebook are spending a ton of time stalking their friends and others that they are closely tied to.
The most interesting part is that everybody has a story about stalking people on Facebook. Stalking has the potential to be of the most sticky component of social network sites. That’s why the Trakzor application on Facebook happened to be so popular. A bunch of other anti-stalker applications showed up on Facebook but were immediately shut down because they were a violation of Facebook’s terms of service.
Enabling people to see who has been viewing their profiles is highly controversial but for people spending hours a day on social networking sites, being able to see which friends’ profiles they are viewing most frequently makes a lot of sense. It also may help reveal the truth about our actual desires. Do you have any interesting stalking stories? Were you able to use the Facebook stalker tool while it was up?
May 13th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
It’s not a “stalker tool”, I’m sure it’s just some shortlist based on some combination of searching, messages and wall posts people have made, photos posted and tagged, and that sort of thing. The point is to let you get to a short group of people more quickly based on your recent activity.
If they really took it down because you posted some ’stalker tool’ story, that’s both amazing and a shame.
May 13th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
@Charlie yeah I kind of liked the tool … they should bring it back with more features
May 13th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Mine still works! Maybe it’s a lingering cookie.
But that’s besides the point. The real issue is the term attached to the act of “stalking” others on Facebook!
Personally, I like to call that creeping (patent pending).
Nick, consider yourself creeped.