Bug reveals how popular you are on Facebook

NEW YORK: A bug that infected Facebook's mobile website let users see view counts for their own and others' posts throughout the social network, The Verge reported.

Similar to how Facebook displays the number of views under videos posted on its site, this bug lets users see the number of views on any article or video link, including those from news media and other official organization's pages.The bug, discovered by some users recently, only affects Facebook's mobile site, and not Facebook for desktop or the company's official mobile apps.

Facebook said it was removing the view counts from user posts. The changes should already be taking effect. The view counts display only under shared or posted links and sometimes under photos, and it is unclear if the metrics are entirely correct.Facebook has no future plans to let individual users see view counts.

A study done by Stanford University researchers and Facebook's data science team in 2013 revealed that the average Facebook user only reaches about 35% of their friends with a single post.

Many have invested heavily in growing the number of likes on their page. But only Facebook holds the keys to the enigmatic News Feed, that is until a bug comes along and we see just how popular we really are.

Source : The Times Of India - Tech