Facebook friends list order on someone elses profile

Facebook has dangled Timeline in front of us for months now. Its a redesign of the Facebook profile page that will make sure that the most important, relevant, and juiciest information about every user for the entirety of their time on Facebook is easy to find. While we wait for them to work their Timeline magic, I have another useful tool for those that use Facebook to stalk learn as much as possible about their friends, colleagues, loved ones, and wanna-be loved ones. A friend recently pointed me to a nifty tool that lets you see who a given Facebook user interacts with most.

Rather than scrolling down your targets wall or checking his or her friends walls and photo albums trying to figure out who of their many friends they are actually the most friendly with, you can just go to their Friends page and use a tool that Facebook has designed for you for easier stalking research. A persons friends are listed alphabetically by default, but theres also an option to list them in grid form:

Choose the grid option to get a more interesting [+] [-]listing of friends

If you list them in grid form, by clicking the button indicated above, the order changes. It may look random at first, because the organizing principle is not immediately obvious. But the grid listing is actually showing you who that person publicly interacts with most on the site.

According to Facebook, these are the friends I [+] [-]actually engage with the most

Your Friends page includes friends who you interact with the most in Wall posts, comments and mutually attended events, says Facebook spokesperson Meredith Chin. We do not select friends to show based on whose profiles you choose to view or who you interact with over messages and chat.

My own list, at right, includes a mix of some of my close friends, friends who recently got engaged or married (necessitating a touching wall post or like from me), one expert source that I talk to for stories, and at least one person Im not very close to at all. I must have liked something posted by that last person recently or since this is reciprocal, this person may be liking lots of stuff that Im posting. By that logic, this list is both the people I engage with most, and the list of people who are most (publicly) interested in the things that Im doing.

Its not revealing anything private, but it is a shortcut to figuring out who someone is interacting with most on the site. Its another example of how analysis of information that is already public can be more revealing when aggregated.

As I have mentioned before, more aggregation is in the works with the new Timeline. The new profile pages have a feature that will take geolocation information youve included in photos or status updates and plot it on a map that appears right below your profile picture. It will give you a chance to showcase the places that you like to go (and which parts of town youre most likely to be found in). Facebook recently acq-hired the team behind Foursquare rival Gowalla to work on Timeline, and to, I assume, make those maps as robust as possible.