There’s a 99-cent iPhone app in the App Store that will let you know when an old friend, coworker, ex or family member decides they’ve had enough of you on Facebook.
Defriended [iTunes link] keeps track of who your Facebook () friends are and lets you know when you lose someone. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding — they clicked “unfriend” by accident. Or maybe it’s war. Either way, thanks Defriended!
The app — created by Dennis Harrison — uses Facebook Connect to import all your friends when you first run it. It checks for changes each time you load it up after that. New friends are placed in the “New friends” column, lost friends go to the “Defriended” column.
When Mashable’s Brenna Ehrlich unfriended me (just the latest turn in an ongoing, passive-aggressive workplace feud), I loaded the app and immediately saw that she’d been placed under “Defriended.”
I experienced some choppy performance when flipping through a long list of friends on an iPhone 3G, but other than that the app seemed to work well. Its entry into the marketplace is well timed. “Unfriend” was the Oxford dictionary’s word of the year in 2009.
Alternative: Facebook Friends Checker for Firefox
This isn’t the first tool we’ve seen for catching people unfriending you. A few months back we wrote about the Facebook Friends Checker script for users of the Firefox () web browser. It’s not quite as easy to get going — you have to install Greasemonkey then import the script — but the functionality is similar. It doesn’t list new friends and old friends, but it will put up a very hard-to-miss notification panel when someone unfriends you.
UPDATE: Our readers report that the app is giving them the error “Invalid API key specified: The application you are trying to access does not exist or has been disabled.” We aren’t getting the error but the app won’t work for us, either.
It’s probable that Facebook has disabled the Connect functionality for the app. The Facebook Platform developer agreement states “You must not notify a user that someone has removed the user as a friend” because that would “circumvent our intended limitations on core Facebook features.”
The app is still in the app store though, so there are bound to be a lot of wasted dollars until Apple pulls it.
UPDATE 2: Facebook has confirmed in an e-mail to us that the app was blocked for violating the developer agreement. “While we cannot remove an application running on another website or platform, we will ensure that applications that access Facebook user data adhere to Facebook Platform policies,” they said. It looks like Apple has pulled the app from the App Store (
), too, though. Sorry, folks. The show’s over. Maybe you’ll just have to count your friends by hand — though if you don’t notice they’re gone without an app, you’re probably fine without them!
