Background: Facebook stores user data in what they call the Facebook Coefficients. They use complicated algorithms (which pages you view, who posts on your wall, who are you tagged with in photos, etc.) to determine who you will likely search for, who are your closest friends, and who should appear in your news feed. Check out the article about jkeesh's bookmarklet.
facebook-puppet: Enter facebook-puppet, which lets you manually select the people you want to propel to the top of your facebook coefficients. To operate, install facebook-puppet as a chrome-extension, click the facebook icon that appears and type in a list of the usernames of the friends you want to motivate. Then click start and let it run. For the average person, a run of several hours will overrun any facebook coefficient data.
Installation: In Chrome, go to chrome://extensions, check developer mode and click Load unpacked extension.... Navigate to the facebook-puppet folder and upload it. If you want, you can pack it as a CRX for portability.
Updates: facebook-puppet is an experiment and a work in progress. In the future, there will be three major changes forthcoming:
- Make it easier to select friends to update
- Finer-grained control over the exact coefficients
- Running in background (non-disruptive)