When I was around 18 years old, Facebook had been out for a few years. MySpace pretty much ceased to exist for my friend group at that time — the only thing interesting to see there anymore was if you had maintained your Top 8 position… actually we probably didn’t even care about that anymore.
Facebook was so much more ‘grown-up’. You could write what you were thinking and it would just be on your page; no need to scroll through that arduous ‘blog’ section on the MySpace homepage where people would drone on about what was bothering them or completing those weird questionnaire things.
Okay, so that shit still existed on Facebook — it was just easier to access and more interesting for some reason? What wasn’t more interesting, though, was when a friend would post a passive aggressive status about being upset at someone and you would sit stressing for hours about whether or not it was about you. It was also pretty common for your Facebook to be ‘fraped’ which, in 2010, was a very accepted term and I don’t think that would go down so well these days for some reason.
Anyway — and most importantly — with Facebook you could also be tagged in photos and see who was becoming friends with who and who was commenting on what, so it was very easy to see what your crushes were up to.
I remember quite distinctly being at a friends house at about that age, and we were doing our weekly Facebook-stalk. There was one boy in particular whose page we would frequent, as my friend really liked him. He was a bit older than us, so we didn’t really see him anymore and the only way to see what he was up to was by visiting his very active Facebook profile.
So there we are, in the study of her home, logging into her page and scrolling through the newsfeed — what a wonderful use of time. You can still always learn so much when scrolling through Facebook.
And then we see it — no, not the dreaded ‘Relationship Status’ update — it was much, much worse than that.
See Who’s Looking At Your Profile!
Oh, god, no. A curious Facebook user wants to know if people are obsessed with visiting their page! There’s a pretty damning list of their Top 5 stalkers, laid bare for all to see. The shame. Thankfully, it wasn’t the crush posting the thing, but one day it could have been. We were mortified at the thought of it. How could they figure it out (#justdeveloperthings I guess)?
Okay so you click the link, let the app access your public information (iT wOn’T pOsT tO yOuR pAgE wItHoUt yOuR PeRmIsSiOn), give it a few seconds and voilà! The evidence. Share. Humiliate.
That was the day we stopped lurking people’s profiles — for a while, anyway.
Fast-forward almost 10 years and I’m in Shanghai, talking with a couple of Chinese software developers in a busy restaurant in the upmarket district of Jing’an. The tree-canopied roads are wide, the boutiques out of my price range and in our five minute walk from where we met the guys to the restaurant where we are now eating, we spot at least three Porsches. No one here appears to be over forty years of age.
I’m there for work, lucky enough to be filming a documentary about the open source community and how it operates in China. As the internet-landscape is so different (as in, they are forbidden access to the same stuff that programmers in the West use for their own software development), they have their own set of unique barriers and ways to overcome them. This required speaking with Chinese software developers, obviously, and so here I was, talking to some over the spiciest frickin’ noodles I’ve ever eaten, what the heck.
So we’re chatting about their journeys into software development and how it’s faring now. While they are both interesting, it’s one story in particular that is most intriguing.
It starts simple enough. The guy is in middle-school and coding games that he would share with his friends. Pretty normal stuff. Then he goes to college, continues his learning journey, though now he’s in Hong Kong. At this time, Facebook gives developers access to their API in order to create games, apps and other tools and with a few of his developer friends, they decide to see what they can offer the Facebook world… and could it be better than Farmville (probably not, hey Aunty Barbara?)?
I am overcome by a range of different emotions while I listen to him continue his story: bewilderment and embarrassment, namely. Maybe the chilli in my system was exacerbating these feelings.
“So Facebook releases their API, and we see this opportunity to kind of, mess with people,” he starts. “So we created this bot that would scrape the public profiles of people who would click on this link and generate their top profile stalkers.”
Eyes-wide, struggling to really comprehend what I was hearing, I ask: “Were they random?”
He laughs.
“Yeah. Obviously there was no real way to know who was looking at whose profile.”
So, eventually, I think a general consensus was reached not that long after this thing was released — actually it might have even been a few years — that it was impossible for people to really know. We found out that Facebook hadn’t developed it, so it wasn’t real, and maybe we were even letting hackers in — they were going to steal our information, our money and our identities!
Whatever it was, it rocked the Facebook world for long enough for this group of Chinese and Cantonese early-20-something developers to be shut down numerous times (each time they would just build another page), acquire millions of users and pretty hefty incomes thanks to ad revenue, before receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Facebook themselves.
“Did you stop?” I asked.
“Yeah, I think it was a good time to stop. We’d made a lot of money from it, so there wasn’t any need to continue, really. It was just fun to see how far we could take it.”
I couldn’t believe it. I was in the presence of the person who caused one of my greatest teenage fears; the person who maybe even caused the downfall of many a relationship.
And then I think about my friend — my poor friend — who, maybe if she could keep tabs on her crush, would have been able to see the relationship he was developing with someone else, and she could have swooped in and made her move before anything truly eventuated between him and the rando and maybe my friend and her crush would be together right now. You should have seen how much she cried when I told her about this.
Anyway, I guess Linkedin was pretty inspired by this since you can actually see who’s viewing your profile (I see you, Bitcoin Man). But it is actually built into their algorithm and it is real. China is also doing it on their social media platforms — of course. Maybe it’s only a matter of time before Facebook does it for real too (but I guess they’re too busy doing illegal things).
Be careful out there, stalkers!
