Inside Facebook

There’s a lot of confusion on Facebook currently around the new Trakzor Facebook app. Many people know Trakzor as the popular MySpace profile tracker, so it’s understandable why many people are finding the Trakzor Facebook app confusing.

Basically, Trakzor is not a true Facebook profile tracker. In order to be tracked as a vistor on someone’s profile page, you have to login to their “Trakzor page,” which means you have to have a Trakzor account as well. Check out what a Facebook customer support representative wrote in a discussion forum on the Trakzor application page:

Trakzor was not created by Facebook. Here are a few important things to know:

- Applications CANNOT track profile visits for users who simply go to another person’s profile; Facebook has made this technically impossible.

- In order to be tracked by this application, you need to click on a Trakzor link in another user’s profile, login to Trakzor, and agree to be tracked. If you do not do this, the other user will not know that you viewed their profile.

- Adding this application is purely optional. If you do not want to participate, please do not add the application to your account.

Well, that should clear everything up. While profile tracking is an extremely popular feature on MySpace, it’s not coming to Facebook anytime soon. I think that’s a good thing for the sense of privacy that exists within the Facebook user community.

Update: Trakzor must be getting a lot of privacy complaints. They’ve added this message to the top of the Trakzor Facebook application page:

YOU WILL NOT BE TRACKED EVERYWHERE YOU GO, WHETHER YOU HAVE TRAKZOR OR NOT. AND YOU WILL NOT BE TRACKED AUTOMATICALLY ON FACEBOOK PROFILES THAT HAVE TRAKZOR. BEFORE YOU DECLARE TRAKZOR A VIOLATION OF PRIVACY, PLEASE READ HOW IT ACTUALLY WORKS.

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