Check How Facebook Ranks Your Friends, Who You Stalk

Have you ever wondered how Facebook ranks your friends for you? The social network keeps a score for everyone you interact with on the service.

This affects the order of results when you start typing a name into the search box, the people that appear in your Friends box when someone visits your profile, whose content shows up in your News Feed (part of the EdgeRank algorithm), and pretty much any list that displays who you interact with on the site. To put this in layman's terms, Facebook tracks who you stalk and who stalks you.

As a result, Facebook users are often curious to know how the service ranks their friends. Many people have created tools to list these figures, and Arjun Sreedharan 's is one of them.

Here are the three steps for using it:

Drag and drop the following link to your browser's bookmarks bar: FB Friends Ranking Login to Facebook and click on the bookmark. You will see a list of your Facebook friends' ranking score (scroll down past the 'undefined' entries).

The first 15 entries of an example ranking score look like this (names have been blocked out to protect the innocent):

As Sreedharan explains, the smaller the friend's score, the higher the rank:

The score gives an indication of the length of the edge between you and the friend. I guess only facebook would know what it exactly means

In other words, unless you're a Facebook engineer, this number is meaningless by itself. It is only useful when compared to your other friends as well as people who you stalk on Facebook.

See also - Facebook is tweaking its News Feed ads algorithm to consider user feedback, including what you report or hide and How Facebook's Entity Graph evolved from plain text to the structured data that powers Graph Search

Top Image Credit: Manjunath Kiran/Getty Images