Facebook Announces Friendship Pages That Show Friends’ Mutual Content
Facebook today announced a new product called Friendship Pages which show users all the content and connections shared by two people who are friends, including photos they’re both tagged in, wall posts and comments between them, Events they both RSVP’d to, and their mutual friends and Likes. While not fully rolled out yet, users will be able to visit Friendship Pages by clicking links on wall posts, and possible relationship feed stories and beneath profile pictures, as long as they are friends with one of the people and have permission to view the other’s profile. By aggregating mutual content, Friendship Pages give users a in-depth look at relationships.
Developed during a recent Facebook Hackathon, Friendship Pages make it easy to see how two people have interacted on Facebook. Use cases include viewing the mutual content of you and your best friend, two siblings, or your ex-girlfriend and their new significant other. Other ways Facebook has recently developed to illustrate the connections between friends include showing the Likes you have in common with a friend on their profile, a ranking of the friends you have the most similar interests to on the Page Browser discovery tool, and aggregated link and Places check-in stories.
Upon visiting a Friendship Page, users will see the two people’s names, and their networks, such as employer or college. The left sidebar includes a photo both people are tagged in as a profile picture, navigation links to different content categories including mutual likes, and a list of all of their mutual friends. The center of the Friendship Page contains the wall posts between the people, the Events they both attended, and posts in which both users commented. Above the ads and modules in the right sidebar is a new “Browse Friendships” module which prompts users to enter their name or a friends name in one input field, another friend’s name in the second input field, and click a button to “See Friendship”. It’s currently unclear where mutual photos will be shown.
Friendship Pages will take a lot of the work out of Facebook browsing. Currently, if you wanted to determine the connection between two other people, you would have to sift through all their tagged photos looking for ones with both people, view their wall-to-wall page, and manually compare their friends and Likes. There was no feasible way to see their shared Event RSVPs or comments.
The friends of friends privacy setting now has greater significance, as a user only needs to be friends with one person and have access to the profile of the other to see their Friendship Page. While fun and useful for learning about how you and a friend or two of your friends are connected, the product could also be used to investigate the connection between one of your friends and someone you don’t know. It could become a powerful tool for jealous users to monitor their significant others, or a masochistic way to watch how a former significant other is interacting with their new partner. Similar relationship issues led Facebook to change how the Photo Memories module chose who to display.
Facebook’s high engagement and user retention statistics are tied to the human desire to forge and maintain connections with others. To date, though, Facebook has been better at showing users snippets of their connections with many different people. By allowing users to focus on a single connection, Facebook will help many realize just how integral the service has been to the formation of deep and long-lasting friendships.
[Update: Friendship Pages are now live for some users. Links to Friendship Pages are appearing on wall posts to or from a user on their profile and on the profiles of friends. Friendship Page links don't appear on posts that are displayed on walls because they're tagged with a user. The Facebook Blog post explained there would also be links below the profile pictures on a the profiles of friends, but these are not present yet. Once on a Friendship Page, users can navigate to any other Friendship Page they have access to through the Browse Friendships module.]
October 28th, 2010 at 11:47 am
Well, this just takes all the fun out of “Facebook Stalking”…
October 28th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
SMH. That’s all I got.
October 28th, 2010 at 12:17 pm
DISLIKE!
October 28th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
[...] relationshipsVentureBeatFacebook Now Tries to Tell the Story Between Two FriendsMashableAFP -Inside Facebook -VatorNewsall 25 news [...]
October 28th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
[...] the feature will respect your basic profile privacy settings, but as Josh Constine pointed out on Inside Facebook, "The friends of friends privacy setting now has greater significance, as a user only needs to be [...]
October 28th, 2010 at 10:56 pm
I HATE IT! It’s annoying. My friend and I were having a conversation Wall 2 Wall and it was cut short by this retardation! Any way of putting my wall to wall back and getting rid of this?!
October 29th, 2010 at 12:46 am
Stalking only existed when it was college networks only. Your info / photos were visible to everyone in your school network.
People barely know about or even how to use half the damn things on FB correctly. This will be no exception. No one cares. I’m just using college only sites now. I’m fed the hell up with FB and all their stupid isht like screwing with groups, which was a mainstay.
October 29th, 2010 at 6:18 am
Interesting! But what use can we give it?
October 29th, 2010 at 11:12 am
This is really creepy. It takes online FB stalking to a whole new level. Time to go change my privacy settings again.
October 29th, 2010 at 8:52 pm
is there a way i can change it back to wall to wall?.. im not liking the see friendship option
October 30th, 2010 at 7:03 am
is there a way to control these pages? it is now live for me, there is as usual ZERO info on facebook about it. if you’ve toyed with it and worked it out, or know where to give feedback please shout!
October 30th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
HOW COME I DON’T HAVE IT YET?
October 30th, 2010 at 5:25 pm
If this cannot be disabled, I’m quitting facebook. They are determined to have all our information public. Very unhappy!
October 30th, 2010 at 9:28 pm
[...] the feature will respect your basic profile privacy settings, but as Josh Constine pointed out on Inside Facebook, “The friends of friends privacy setting now has greater significance, as a user only needs [...]
October 31st, 2010 at 2:04 am
How to stop/hide/block/ that shit!?! , why we never have our own choose to select what we want!
October 31st, 2010 at 6:47 am
Hey Facebook,
I read another post here and you listened to feedback; so I hope this reaches you…
Please read this as a fellow web developer, I try and weigh everything quite deliberately deciding on a new feature; however, you guys are treading a very fine line…
1 –
I looked at my profile today, 1/3 of my home profile page was large, full paragraph, image advertisements, you are going the way of MySpace. We like facebook most of all because it is clean; please please don’t destroy that. Google is the ad-giant, follow in their footsteps.
2 –
Privacy; I know people may seem to not care about privacy, but we do care about relationships. We don’t want our relationships open to public examination; I’m not saying kill the feature – just put a little “Opt Out” link on the side. Please.
3 – Same above for photo memories; and any new tools you want to make to facilitate “Facebook stalking”. Person A sees photo of B & C and is sad; forced upon A by photo memories.
Applaud your experimentation, initiative, but “Opt Out”. Please.
October 31st, 2010 at 6:55 am
Great, but how do you get rid of it?
October 31st, 2010 at 7:11 am
I think this new addition is stupid without the ‘wall-to-wall’ feature?! now I cannot write on my friends wall with what he/she said below it to prompt my response. Some people may say i can ‘comment’ on their wall post, but i hate ‘commenting’ as ‘wall to wall’ is there for a reason! The ‘see friendship’ addition is not bad, but at least give us the ‘wall to wall’ luxury back. Its infuriating. Facebook is trying to hard to be technical, creating it a chore to socialize!
October 31st, 2010 at 8:08 am
I agree with “WTF”… This enables unlimited stalking by pyschos. If I have my privacy settings controlled and the friend does not, It blows it out the window. There better be an added privacy option for this. :>(
October 31st, 2010 at 8:10 am
[...] Facebook Announces Friendship Pages That Show Friends’ Mutual Content [...]
October 31st, 2010 at 10:08 am
….and i really need to know the relationship between 2 people because…..?
and i really don’t like how it replaced the “wall-to-wall” button. now it’s really inconvenient to reply to wall posts since i can’t see the wall-to-wall and reply at the same time.
why does it just keep getting more stalkery…
can’t we just enjoy the convenience of talking to people without feeling like our whole lives are laid out for the world to see?
October 31st, 2010 at 11:46 am
This is really bad shit! I do not want to appear in something like this!!!
How can I prevent from appearing there besides defriending everybody?
October 31st, 2010 at 12:26 pm
how do i disable it?
October 31st, 2010 at 1:45 pm
Why isn’t there a privacy setting for this? Totally not cool for those of us who don’t want to broadcast all of our friendships.
October 31st, 2010 at 3:46 pm
Boring…..this will lead to many people putting their page to private
October 31st, 2010 at 4:27 pm
Can’t work out how to turn this off!
I am seeing use of Facebook decline among my friends and even more importantly — the QUALITY — of Facebook posts is declining. This is one more thing to make me wonder if it’s worth it.
November 1st, 2010 at 4:55 am
Some of you may have now noticed the feature “View You and ______ “(insert friends name).
Well, like many of you, I also have a dummy profile. The great thing about this feature is that you are not (so far) regulated to just “you” and a friend. In other words, you can enter a friend and another friend and compare. You find out how many friends they have in common, wall to wall postings, their mutual likes, photo’s tagged in together and perhaps other options.
Okay, so maybe you want some dirt on someone that is on your friends list and the other person isn’t? Well, (again, so far) this is not a problem. As long as the other ‘mark’ is pending your your friend request, you can still enter both names see the above interaction.
I have really enjoyed this board and I hope that this posting can offer someone here an advantage.
November 1st, 2010 at 10:12 am
give us an ‘opt-out’ feature for the friendship stuff. PLEASE!!!
November 1st, 2010 at 10:24 am
FACEBOOK is what is REALLY stalking ALL of US. Anything you ever type or upload they keep forever. Just changed the settings so they keep your chats forever. Now they have this “see friendship” button. That is an Invasion of Privacy. Why on Earth would I want someone not involved be able to click a button to see every convo I have had with a person along with all the pics we are tagged in together, events we are both attending, places we both checked into? How does that benefit ME Facebook? It benefits, Stalkers, Haters, and Police. Facebook, Kill Yoself. Whats next???
November 1st, 2010 at 2:41 pm
This is BEYOND creepy.
I really hate when facebook makes changes like this that actually deter users from enjoying facebook.
Features like this are completely unnecessary and potentially harmful to one’s privacy and one’s reputation.
Like someone said above, PLEASE include an option to Opt Out or disable the “See Friendship” for those of us who like to keep our personal, private lives, well, personal and private.
November 1st, 2010 at 11:37 pm
What are you trying to do to us, you take away clear our chat in the chat box, now brought it back, Thank you very much. Now we have see Friendship, Thats invading peoples privacy.. please remove or tell me how to remove it from my page and not having to pay for it.
Thanks.
November 2nd, 2010 at 6:36 am
this is ridiculous!!! wall to wall and see friendship should not b available for everyone to see it is just like reading their private messages!!!! this needs to b removed from FB immediately!!!
November 2nd, 2010 at 1:37 pm
I really don’t like this! We should have an option whether or not to participate.
November 2nd, 2010 at 5:40 pm
Facebook, You SUCK! What is the purpose, why did you create such a thing? How about spending some time programming a better plan for artists to be seen and heard instead of invading the little privacy folks have had. So many reunions have been made here, and now you push us away. So be it.
November 2nd, 2010 at 6:02 pm
DO. NOT. WANT.
This is going to make me lock down my privacy options, cut my friends list and stop posting to anything other than private groups.
How about teenage bullying? It’s not up to FB to make it easy to see this stuff. I have a wall and if people want to trawl through it, fine, but don’t do it this way.
I want an opt out.
November 2nd, 2010 at 6:35 pm
“See Friendship” is a REAL invasion of privacy. What were you thinking??????? Please remove it OR tell me how to get this off my page now – - or tell me how to disable this from my page. I do not post or comment so that one of my friend’s friends (who is not my friend) can see what I/we have posted or commented on.I agree with those who have written that this is like stalking.
November 2nd, 2010 at 10:27 pm
Facebook, are you listening to what your users are saying??
November 3rd, 2010 at 8:57 am
Please, give us an Opt Out or remove it all together!
November 3rd, 2010 at 11:31 am
I will delete my profile if this passes.. The last thing I need is some stranger reading my private thoughts and comments to another friend. I dislike it big time!
November 3rd, 2010 at 8:52 pm
NO! NO! NO!
I already dislike that you allow people to click on my current activity and read comments I’ve posted on other non-mutual friends’ walls, but THIS IS RIDICULOUS!
People are going to stop using FB if you do not RESPECT OUR PRIVACY!
November 3rd, 2010 at 9:24 pm
look at it this way. your wall to wall convos were never private. the real danger is allowing “friends of friends” in your privacy settings. A LOT of people are careless with who they friend on facebook, and if you have a lot of facebook friends you’re increasing the chances of a complete stranger seeing your information. Facebook is taking what you and your “friends” have already put out there for the world and is giving you a new way to see it. the lesson is to be careful what you put out there, and who you allow to see it. Friends only, guys.
November 3rd, 2010 at 11:56 pm
You guys are all idiots. Facebook does not read or operate this website.
What’s next, are you going to tell the President of the United States what to do on a CNN comments section and expect him to read/reply?
November 4th, 2010 at 12:50 am
END IT. NOW. NOOOWWWWWW.
November 4th, 2010 at 5:53 am
So is there a video tutorial that shows us how to disable the privacy settings or is facebook avoiding the question with statements. Anyone?
November 4th, 2010 at 6:19 am
i think all fb needs to now is let everyone see everyones inboxs to make stalking complete
November 4th, 2010 at 7:13 am
I think this is a very interesting application of user profile data, and reflects Zuckerberg’s core Harvard interests in developing social applications for the web (I’m reading The Facebook Effect currently :^). I can’t see how any of the panic the, uh, panicking commenters express above is justified. You people all UPLOADED YOUR OWN CONTENT, and this new feature does not present more of a privacy issue than existed before. A “stranger reading my private thoughts and comments to another friend” — really? How would that happen? Perhaps the other way around — your friend could read your personal confessions to a stranger, but that could happen now. Maybe you just don’t trust your friends (which may be valid), in which case maybe you shouldn’t be on Facebook at all!
As for how this will be used — I think the company usually introduces features that are structurally interesting but don’t define how they must be used. The point of FB is to allow users to find uses for the features. That is what is so addictive about the site.
November 4th, 2010 at 8:42 am
My use of FB has declined significantly over the last year as privacy protection has become more complicated. This is just going to make it more restrictive.
November 4th, 2010 at 6:04 pm
i think this is an ivassion of privacy, will there be an off button in privacy setting ,i would hope so but it doesnt sound like it.
why doesnt facebook do something really good,how about locking down peoples photos so no one can steal them,what do think of that facebook? maybe you could work on that one,which alot of people would bennifit from.. :P
November 4th, 2010 at 9:48 pm
im closing my account!
November 5th, 2010 at 5:08 am
WHAT ARE YOU THINKING????
IF I DON’T GET AN OPT OUT FROM THIS CREEPY FEATURE
i am opting out of facebook completely – please, everyone that does not want forced participation go to this link and join us:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Opt-Out-of-the-FB-Friendship-Feature/161397397225256
November 5th, 2010 at 6:57 am
I’ll just have to send all my comments via PM… and that really sucks. PLEASE LET ME OPT OUT! I already delete all those stupid “activity” announcements like “whatever just wrote on joe’s wall” because it’s creepy and I don’t need people following my every move, it’s weird.
November 6th, 2010 at 5:37 pm
DON’T LIKE – FACEBOOK – YOU HAVE CROSSED THE LINE! If people want to stalk ok, but it shouldn’t be encouraged to THIS extent.
GET RID OF IT!!!!!!
November 7th, 2010 at 7:05 pm
[...] the “see friendship” link that automatically replaced the “wall-to-wall” feature. now, you can see the two [...]
November 10th, 2010 at 8:42 am
HATE IT!!!! Sorry I even have gotten sucked into FB by co-workers and family.
November 11th, 2010 at 6:33 am
I absolutely HATE that third parties can, with one click, see the back and forth between two friends. Yes, I know that information was not private before — but someone had to be weird enough to specifically want to check all the interactions between me and my friend (or, more importantly to me, my daughter and a friend). Now FB pretty much INVITES them to do it, encouraging a kind of nosiness I’m clearly not alone in thinking is disturbing. This could be a FB dealbreaker, unless FB adds an opt-out.
November 13th, 2010 at 12:45 pm
[...] the email scene. Moreover, Facebook Mail is clearly the next step ahead of the two weeks old ‘See Friendship‘ feature that showed all interactions between two people on the [...]
November 15th, 2010 at 4:41 am
[...] the email scene. Moreover, Facebook Mail is clearly the next step ahead of the two weeks old ‘See Friendship‘ feature that showed all interactions between two people on the [...]
November 15th, 2010 at 1:22 pm
[...] to store all your conversations with friends. A couple of weeks ago, Facebook launched a “see friendship” feature: soon it might be able to show all recorded correspondence with that friend, private [...]
November 20th, 2010 at 12:12 am
How do I turn this see friendship thing off? it’s weird and creepy
November 23rd, 2010 at 12:55 pm
[...] website builds up. Increasingly this information is moving beyond just simple likes. Now we can view‘friendship pages’ within Facebook, these are like a glorified ‘wall to wall’ option from years ago, but [...]
November 27th, 2010 at 11:44 am
Good news
The ‘see friendship’ feature can be effectively disabled. Completely. I tested it with different ways adjusting the settings.
Now the bad news. Well. I’m sure it is bad for 99% of facebook users.
Follow these steps:
1. Goto Account – > Privacy Settings
2. Click the link ‘Customize Settings.’
3. Scroll down to the third section ‘Things other share’
4. You will see this Friends can post on my wall [x]. Remove the checkmark
This means your wall is closed. Yes, bad news.
This means your friends can’t write on your wall.
Any previous messages are not deleted. You can verify this. You probably want to ‘clean’ your wall anyway as no new messages will be posted.
It gets worse. Any friend can’t see the ‘friendship’ between you and him/her.
And they can’t see your friendship with any common friends. Which is the objective of the change, correct?
Now, you are going to ask. How can they contact me?
There are only two basic ways:
a- Private messages.
b- You can change your status and they can reply to it in the comments.
In option b, when you change your status, you can make the change visible to a list or to a friend only.
You can also change your status and make it visible to one friend only.
The problem is, he/she doesn’t know that the message is only visibile to him/her. So you probably have to tell him/her in the status changed.
You want to test it? You need two friends. One to send a couple of messages and get a reply and another common friend that can verify that the messages exchanged are not visible to him/her.
Too complex? Yes, I know. So we probably want to stop using Facebook then.
November 29th, 2010 at 9:00 pm
I don’t like this! We should have an option whether or not to participate.
GET RID OF IT FACEBOOK WHAT IS SAID BETWEEN TWO FRIENDS SHOULD REMAIN BETWEEN THEM AND NOT FOR OTHERS TO SEE !
December 6th, 2010 at 11:06 pm
It seems the only way to ‘turn this off’ is to go to > privacy > sharing > customize > things others share> can see wall posts by friends (change to only me)
i think this works, with some local (novice testing)
December 22nd, 2010 at 12:31 pm
ummmm …….but couldn’t people already see wht is said between two people before….by looking at their “wall to wall ” post
December 22nd, 2010 at 1:14 pm
@San: Yes, but Friendship Pages greatly expands the wall-to-wall feature.
December 27th, 2010 at 5:58 pm
Facebook is a real disappointment.
I wonder why we are still so addicted to this thing when in fact it takes stalking to a whole new level, and doesn’t seem to respect our privacy rights much.
I agree with an earlier post. There should be an ‘opt out’ feature.
January 2nd, 2011 at 2:27 pm
I really hate the “see friendship” option. Sure, it’s cool when you’re “stalking” your friend or a guy you like, but I don’t like knowing that any one of my 629 friends could be reading the wall posts, comments, and pictures of my best friend and I. It is too public. Plus, I don’t want my MOM to read that sort of stuff.. :/
Please give the option to disable this, Facebook.
January 7th, 2011 at 2:53 am
This is absolutely frightening. I’m really freaking out right now. I went to go delete comments I’ve left but some of them are from years ago and it takes hours to get that far back in other peoples profiles. I’m wondering if the answer is to create a new profile and delete the old one. Then on the new profile start over knowing the new rules? Facebook is so stupid. They are going to lose a lot of users for the breach of privacy.
January 12th, 2011 at 4:55 am
Very smart (and cool)
People want te be the same as there friends. If they like the same things, they feel a like.
February 7th, 2011 at 2:36 pm
Definitely invading privacy. I DONT LIKE IT. Spent hours trying to remove the ridiculous thing. Thank you for the notifFB and letting me make a decision for myself, my family and my friends privacy. An OPT OUT button please because if NOT maybe a need to DELETE the account all together.
August 22nd, 2011 at 9:51 am
[...] existed outside of novelties like PastPosts , “The Museum of Me” and the controversial “See Friendship” button. Our Likes and Tweets are stickier than they were before. They are more prominent, [...]
February 15th, 2012 at 4:44 am
[...] new features that give us access to these insights. For example, Facebook recently released ‘friendship pages’ that show all the connections and content shared by two people (such as conversations, photos [...]
August 15th, 2012 at 10:15 am
[...] pic of the two of us and get rid of that ugly no body box… For more information, I found this little post for [...]
October 15th, 2012 at 1:41 pm
[...] existed outside of novelties like PastPosts , “The Museum of Me” and the controversial “See Friendship” button. Our Likes and Tweets are stickier than they were before. They are more prominent, [...]
November 10th, 2012 at 3:01 pm
[...] to remind you that your whole life is on Facebook, and if you leave, you lose. Facebook originally launched the feature two years ago but it hasn’t gotten much love since. That’s a shame and today’s update is nice because [...]