A friend of mine informed me of this article. In the article there is a link that you put in your toolbar to basically figure out what Facebook thinks you are stalking. Now I think thats an interesting concept. So I had to dig a bit further and find out what exactly that metric is.

So the interesting part is that Facebook tracks whenever you type into the Search bar. That generates some ajax calls to things you have searched for most recently. That is what the article talks about.

The first time you load the page, the Search bar fires off this call.

https://www.facebook.com/ajax/typeahead/search/first_degree.php?__a=1&filter[0]=user&lazy=1&viewer=6001041&token=v7&stale_ok=1&__user=600104

obviously my id is 6001041 – so if you want to make the same call, then you can either use the link above or replace my id with yours.

What is this call? its basically gives you an list of things that you have searched for with a negative index sorted to the top, being what you are most likely to search for. In the payload of this json call, they’ve also put the url of the profile picture, thats why it shows up so fast – so once you’ve entered something into the Search Bar, it does a quick search through this index and then displays x number of results while then making ajax calls for the profile pics.

then after you are done finding what you want they fire off this call.

https://www.facebook.com/ajax/typeahead/record_metrics.php?__a=1

this is a post call that stores all sorts of statistical information, pretty interesting to say the least.