How to Deal
with Huge Friends Lists
On Myspace
Contents
- Browsing Your Friends List
- Myspace ID Numbers
- Finding A Friend By Browsing
- Changing Your Top Friends
- Deleting Your Friends
If you're here trying to find a way to alphabetize your friends list, I'm sorry to say that I have not seen any way to do this.
I'm sure someone can come up with software that can accomplish this. Until then, you may want to read about some of these friend-browsing habits I've picked up on.
Browsing Your Friends List
There are 3 places you that you browse your current friends. These can all be accessed from your "Home" section, within "My Friend Space":
- View All of My Friends
- Edit Friends
- Change my "Top Friends"
Myspace is badly designed for browsing your friends. They are organized by their ID numbers, and not by their user names or their real names.
Myspace ID Numbers
Every myspace user is given a unique ID Number when they register. The ID Number is a long and unmemorable number that is now reaching ridiculously high numbers (around 88 million last I checked). This simply reflects the number of users on myspace.
People who registered recently have higher numbers, while those who registered earlier on in myspace's existence have lower numbers. I haven't seen any exceptions to this yet, so I'm assuming that new users are always given new numbers and that deleted accounts don't have their ID numbers re-used.
Where to Find a myspace user's ID Number
As long as you didn't get to someone's site by entering their custom url (ie: http://www.myspace.com/bobsaget), the web address of a myspace user's site looks something crazy like this:
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.view
profile&friendid=89540673&MyToken=5b380714-da24-4191-
b6b9-b4400b880135
The number in the bold section is the user's ID. In this case it was 89540673. Actually, this sequence of "friendid=number" can also be found when doing just about anything at someone's profile: viewing their friend's list, messaging them, commenting them, etc.
Page Number Browsing
At the top of each friend browsing section are a set of numbered links referring to pages. The first page has your friends with the lowest ID numbers while the last page has those with the highest ID numbers.
Let's say the friend you're looking for has an ID number somewhere in the middle range (let's say its 40 million - 40000000) Because only a few page numbers are shown at once, it can be very annoying trying to get to the page with that person. The ">>" and "<<" buttons only skip 5 pages at a time.
A much faster way to get to a page is to edit the url directly:
http://home.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewfriends
&friendID=55630929&friendCount=4557&userName=Final%2BBoss
&page=78&prevPage=1&PREVPageFirstONERETURENED=2035
&PREVPageLASTONERETURENED=25805
Just change the number after "page=" to be the one you want to get to, then press enter or click GO (or whatever you do to get to a url you just typed).
Finding a Friend by Browsing
Yesterday you accepted a friend request, but now you have no idea how to find the person's profile. If you didn't comment or message each other, and you don't remember their name, you're just going to have to look through your friends until you recognize them...otherwise they're lost.
Make sure this doesn't happen by messaging or commenting the person RIGHT AWAY!
Changing your Top Friends
Finding a friend to put in your top friends requires finding out their ID number, then systematically narrowing in on the page that they're located on. Once you know their ID number and are in the "Change Top Friends" section, use the shortcut of typing in the page number in the url to arrive at a page you think will have IDs close to the one you're looking for.
Once there, you can find out what the IDs of the people on that page are by hovering your mouse over their pictures and keeping it there for a moment until the ID shows up. You can then decide to go to a higher or lower page number based on the IDs you find.
Deleting a Friend
This involves the same process as changing your top friends, but in the "Edit Friends" section - find out the ID and use page number url navigation to hone in on the page containing the friend.
If you're lucky, the friend will have posted a bulletin recently - each bulletin message contains a "Delete Friend" button, probably because people tend to spam with bulletins.