Today I was searching for a friend’s website as, to my shame, I’d forgotten the URL. But, fascinating as that is, it’s not the story here.
I think I’ve run into a little bug in the wildy popular social networking and work dodging site Facebook.
Listed in the search engine results from my query was a link to a likely looking Facebook “public search listing” page. This page typically contains a truncated list of some of the owner’s Facebook contacts, presumably to help you decide if the page belongs to the person you’re looking for or not. I’d previously sent this particular friend a Facebook “friend request” to get added to her list of contacts, but she hadn’t replied to or confirmed the request yet so, to all intents and purposes, I wasn’t yet on the list and shouldn’t ever appear on her public search listing page. So goes the theory anyway.
When I clicked through from the search results to my friend’s public search listing page I noticed, to my surprise, that I was shown as being in her contact list already! This would appear to be a bug in the page. I’ve no clue about Facebook internals, but I would hazard a guess there is confusion around my status as a friend (or not) as I have an existing but unconfirmed “friend request”. However, the good news is that the scope of the bug would appear to be quite limited as attempting to click through to my friend’s (private) main profile page gives the expected “you need to be a friend to see this page” type of error.
I did some more experimentation and characterised the bug a little further:
- Click through from a search when you’re not logged in to your own Facebook account and you don’t appear in the Friends list. This is as expected.
Also notice the weird "menghubungi" text on the right?
- If you log in from the public search listing page, you still don’t appear in the Friends list. Again, this expected behaviour.
Logged in, but not on the list
- But if you click through from a search when you are logged in to your own Facebook account, and you have sent the person a “friend request” that hasn’t been confirmed, you appear in their Friends list!
Logged in and clicked through from a search - I'm now a friend apparently!
Notice how the page shows me as being a Friend, but also offers me the option of becoming a Friend? Clearly, that can’t be right, right?
This isn’t a serious problem (I think), more of a curio than anything else. I’ll be reporting it to Facebook in any case and we’ll see what happens after that.
John Girvin is an experienced a software engineer and web developer based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He draws on over 14 years of hard won, real world experience of different projects, clients and working environments.
John is currently working with the Art Technology Group (ATG), developing J2EE based, market leading e-commerce technology.
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yep, I spotted this yesterday by a different method, and also noticed that I was ‘friends’ with all the other displayed friends of that person – I hadn’t sent a friend request to them either!