How to Know When Someone 'De-Friends' You on Facebook

Just last week Facebook reminded users of the options they had for ignoring unwanted friend requests and the social network is trying to make it as painless and subtle as possible for all parties involved. Another issue that got the same treatment was removing a friend from your list, which was also a subtle action with the ones removed not notified in any way. Unless they have the Friends Checker Greasemonkey script, that is, which brings up a hard to miss message when a user removes them.


“When the script detects that someone you used to be friends with is no longer one of your friends, a message will appear informing you about who it was and giving a link to their profile page,” the script's entry on Userscripts.org says. “The script checks by default once per hour when on Facebook, but this time can be increased.“

The script, spotted by Inside Facebook, is simple to use, assuming you can handle installing a Greasemonkey script, and its functionality is limited but to the point. Facebook Friends Checker regularly polls the social network to see who has “de-friended” you in the interval since the last check. The polling interval can be adjusted by going to the Greasemonkey entry in Firefox's Tools menu and then selecting “User script commands” followed by “Set time interval to check for removed friends.”

With Friends Checker you can automatically see who has removed you from their list every time you visit the site. Of course you could check this manually by going through each friend's profile but this isn't really an option especially for those with hundreds of friends. Facebook itself, for obvious reasons, doesn't send any notifications in this event. However, there's no need to worry just yet as the script has been installed only about 20,000 times which, while a decent number by itself, pales in comparison to the more than 250 million registered users the social network has at the moment so the chances of someone you're removing using it are pretty slim.

Source: Softpedia.com