Somebody Unfriended you on Facebook? (Also: spurned by family)

Many Updates Below - make sure you read them all

So, you have your Facebook account which you go to regularly. You've got 250 friends now! Good for you! You're popular, or at least you have a lot of associations with different people, all wanting to know what you're doing on Facebook.

But suddenly, you notice that you only have 249 friends. Oh no!!!! Who dropped you from their hallowed list? Unfortunately, there's no way to tell on Facebook. You don't get any notice that somebody has dropped you. You just see your number of friends drop, and then keep dropping, and going down, down, down....Good heavens, what did you do??

Anyway, now there is a way you can find out who has dropped you, as long as you're using Firefox as your browser.



"Facebook Friends Checker" is a script that you can run on your Firefox browser (requires that you install the "Greasemonkey" add-on). Then, every time you open your Facebook page (well, every 2 hours is the default, so if you keep loading it, it won't run every time), it will take a list of your friends and compare it to the list it took last time. If there's somebody missing, it will find out who it is and then tell you at the top of your page. It's really handy.

One good side effect is that it doesn't just do your friends list. With the new Facebook "connections" idea, it also does people you have sent friend requests to who then actively "ignore" (i.e. click on the "ignore" button) that request. Thus, you can tell who is so offended that you would actually want to be friends with them that they would actually "ignore" you rather than just thoughtlessly adding you to the pile of 400+ friends that they probably have. Maybe they don't want any more noise? Or maybe they've heard from those hundreds of people who already dropped you (seriously, man, what did you do to piss them off so much?).

Which brings me to the second part of my subject. I sent a second friend request to a family member, just to see if the fact that it disappeared from my list was just a bug or not, and it took just a day to have it viciously ignored (thank you, Facebook Friends Checker!). Do I smell? Did she stumble upon my plans for world domination and decide "I don't want to associate with that looney?" I don't know.

Not that it's any skin off my nose. I just find it funny. Hence the tongue-in-cheek nature of this post.

There have been a couple of people who turned down friend requests but, since it was such a long time between me sending the request and me finding that person again, I completely forgot whether I had sent the request. I think I bothered one poor high school classmate 5 times before realizing that I wasn't forgetting to do it. It was just getting ignored. Now, with Facebook Friends Checker, I won't have to worry about that anymore.

*update 1 (9/17/09): Just re-read the script page, and it *could* work on other browsers. Make sure you read the site carefully if you're not using Firefox. I have a feeling Internet Explorer is out, though.


*update 2 (10/29/09): This seems obvious, but I completely didn't think of it until I went back to the script's home page, but there are a couple of limitations that the guy is supposedly working on.  The main one is that it's possible that the script won't be able to actually tell you who it is if that person has removed themselves from the Facebook search function (so basically, the only people who can find them in a search are friends).  Because it compares your old friends list to your new one and then sees who's missing, the script won't be able to find the old friend's profile page any more (because you're not friends anymore, duh!)  Supposedly, he's been working on that, but it's still happening to me, getting the "cannot find profile data".  Something else to keep an eye on.

*update 3 (1/4/10): Now this doesn't seem to be working at all.  I'm trying a few experiments to see why that might be the case.  Going to the script site, it doesn't sound like this is a universal problem, so it may still work for you.  Give it a try and see.  I'll update again once I have it working again.

*update 4 (1/4/10): Just went to the page (should have done that to begin with), and evidently the Facebook changes in early November broke the script, but it's now been fixed.  If you installed it before then, you might want to reinstall it.  If you installed it after then, it should work fine for you.  My experiment hasn't completed yet, but now that I know it was broken in November, which is when I started having problems, I assume that it will work fine now that I've reinstalled.  Will let you know.

*update 5 (1/4/10):  Seems to be working fine now that I've reinstalled.  I'll keep you updated if it goes wonky again.

*update 6 (2/2/10):  It works!  Just had my first "friend" fall of my of my friends list since the last update (I'm popular that way).  Sure enough, an hour or so later, up pops the notification of who it was.  Excellent work.

*Update 7 (2/15/10): It appears that the new Facebook broke it again. However, for those technically inclined, you can follow the directions on this page to change the script so that it works. I'm going to try it out and let you know whether it worked for me.

*Update 8 (2/16/10): Just experimented with a friend, and the changes that are on that link worked! The change is easy to make, but if you want to wait until the script designer actually implements the change, I would imagine he will post there when he's back and has done it. Keep an eye out.

*Update 9 (1/15/11): Should have posted this sooner, but this script will no longer tell you if somebody has ignored your friend request. That's sad, but understandable. It still works wonders otherwise, though! And, the family member who prompted this post, she finally did accept a friend request. Yay, me!!!!