Facebook Restores Anonymous "Defriending"
Loophole in new Timeline feature had made it possible to see who had taken you off their list of virtual friends.
| Posted Monday, Sept. 26, 2011, at 10:37 AM
UPDATE: That could have been messy.
Facebook moved quickly over the weekend to close an apparent loophole in its new Timeline feature that allowed users to easily tell which of their former friends had “defriended” them, BuzzFeed and CNET report.
Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Timeline this past Thursday amid a number of other changes and tweaks to the social networking site. In essence, the new feature provides a visual, chronological portrait of your life as Facebook knows it. In Zuckerberg’s words, it makes it easier for users to share the “stories of their lives.” But, as a number of tech blogs were pointing out by Friday, more practically speaking it provided everyone with a rather simple way to tell which of their former friends had ended their online friendship.
(Mashable has an easy-to-follow four-step guide on how you could exploit the new feature prior to the fix.)
While the fix will spare plenty of us hurt feelings and some passive aggressive IMs, not everyone’s pleased. “Major bummer,” BuzzFeed writes. “This was one of the best parts about the new Timeline!”
POST Thursday, Sept. 22: A handful of changes to Facebook over the past few weeks has progressed into a near do-over of the social networking site's profile pages with Thursday’s announcement of "Timeline."
The new feature -- which essentially provides a visual, chronological portrait of your life as Facebook knows it -- was the most dramatic of the tweaks announced at the social media giant's f8 conference.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "Millions and millions of people have spent years curating the stories of their lives, and today there's just no good way to share them... we think this is a real problem, and we think that we have the solution"
Developers will be able to use Timeline immediately, but anyone can view a preview and sign up in advance here. Facebook will roll out Timeline to all users in the next few weeks.
Other features announced at the conference include:
- Partnerships with Hulu LLC, Rdio Inc, and Spotify, which will allow users to watch videos, share song histories and listen in a group.
- The News Ticker and News Feed: Unveiled yesterday, the ticker is the new Twitter-like recent activity feed on the upper right side of the Facebook main page. Or, as the internet has dubbed it, the "Facebook in ur Facebook so you could Facebook while you Facebook."
- Social news feeds, better displaying what your friends are reading.
USA Today and Forbes have liveblogs from Zuckerberg's keynote with a more complete rundown of what each of these new features will do.
