Find Where Facebook Ranks Your Friends
This morning we posted the "Nefarious O Value" theory of the mystery Facebook Stalker feature. Now, a second tech-savvy tipster writes in with step-by-step instructions for how to find Facebook's unexplained "O" ranking for every single one of your friends on the site. In other words—from what we can gather, at least—there's a file on your computer that tells you exactly how the site's algorithms rank each and every person in your social circle. The instructions are after the jump. Please write in and let us know what your results are. The code may soon be cracked!
To whom it may concern:
If you used Facebook's search bar feature yesterday and were able to see your "top 5" friends, then there will be a PHP file containing the "o" ranking of every single one of your Facebook friends stored somewhere on your computer.
Please note: this tip applies to anyone whose computer saves temporary internet files.
(1) Open your "Temporary Internet Files" folder. (For example, from Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options > Settings > View Files.)
(2) Within the folder, look for files last accessed on May 13 around the time you first tested out the Facebook search bar function.
(3) You should be able to find a PHP file called "typeahead_search."
(4) Save this file to another folder and open it with a text editor like Notepad (or the Mac equivalent). You will see that the file contains script for every single one of your friends. (See the script here for an example.). If you search within the file for the name of any of your Facebook friends, you will find their ranking after the letter "o." The five people with the lowest "o" rankings will be the same as your "Facebook 5."