Sociolatte

How to read random status updates on Facebook from people who are not your friends

Image Credit: Gizmodo

The idea of this post came from a websites that is all over the news for the last 24 hours. The site is called WeKnowWhatYouredoing.com. If you wondering how this works well it uses the open Facebook graph to randomly pull public Facebook status updates from people who should not be posting that kind of stuff. An example of an update that you should not have on your Facebook status is that 'You're Hungover'. The reason for this is that your Boss might be on your friend list and you have not set your privacy settings right. Another status update could be about 'people hating their boss' when you do not like you boss you do not update it as a status message, for all your colleagues and boss to see - might cost you your job. So if you go to the app you can see who is hungover and who is doing things like drugs etc. These are things you do not put in your Facebook status updates. The founder of the site says this was created to let people know that public status updates are viewable by everyone and please set your privacy options right before you go on a Facebook Status Rampage update.


Ok, so the site only offers pre-selected updates, but what if you want to just browse randomly and see other Facebook updates based on keywords you choose. maybe you just want to snoop around or maybe it's for a study you're doing. Whatever be the reason, if you want to just check random status updates and have some fun snooping around on Facebook this is what you can do. You can use a search query using Facebook's open graph and have fun. Here is an example of a search string. https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=hate%20my%20boss&type=post&locale=en_GB. Now if you look at this string you will notice that the keywords come after q=. Each keyword is followed by the %20 sign. So everything between Q= and &type remains the same. You can play around with the keywords. So let us say I want to search for people who have updates their status with the words Disneyland. The search string will look like this - https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=disneyland%20&type=post&locale=en_GB. So just copy this into your browser window and get started, can turn out to be pretty good fun. You need to have a Facebook account for this to work.


If you are shocked that something like this can actually be done please go to your Facebook privacy settings controls and set everything to friends. This one step will take care of everything for you. 

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