Find who unfriended you on Facebook. The Facebook way.

I was perusing my Facebook news feed today and blocking all the applications/games I do not want to be reading updates about. I realized I see wall posts from this app “Profile Visitor”, even though I have blocked this app numerous times. So is the case with another app “Find who unfriended you”. The latter, made me wonder if there is in fact a way to find out who unfriended me. Guess what, there indeed is a trivial way to figure this out.

If we check out our General Account Settings page, just beneath the language settings, there is this option to download all of our Facebook data. Click on that and it will prompt you for your password, after which you will get a feedback saying Facebook will contact you once the archive is ready to download. You will typically be notified that the archive is ready to be downloaded in about an hour. Once you get this archive, everything is pretty much straight forward. This archive has information on everything you have done on Facebook. From your comments to likes to photos to profile changes to subscriptions to everything you can think of. The information we are interested in, resides in the file friends.html. This has a list of all of your current friends.

Now, to figure out who unfriended you, is pretty trivial. Download your data periodically. Compare the current version of the friends.html to the copy from the previous archive and you have the list of people who unfriended you during that period. Let me know if there is a better approach to this. Not that I am obsessed with the friend count on Facebook.

Happy unfriend-ing :P