How do you know if someone deleted you on facebook

Update: Facebook has disabled this new feature, which was clearly not supposed to be there. "It's been fixed now," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. The original article is below.

Currently, Facebook does not notify you when someone unfriends you on the social network. That may soon change with the upcoming Facebook Timeline feature, which will be replacing your current Facebook profile.

Unless Facebook changes this, you can actually see who has unfriended you during any point in time you've been on the social network. Here's how (via BuzzFeed):

1. Get the new Facebook Timeline feature. There's an official way and an unofficial way.
2. Choose a prior year on your Facebook Timeline and click on the number of friends you connected with that year in the Friends box.
3. Click on the "Made x New Friends" list - anyone with an Add Friend link next to their name either unfriended you, or you unfriended them.

Also: Shut Facebook and Twitter down for 6 weeks before elections

If this is too much for you, stop now. If you can't get enough, repeat steps 2 and 3 with another year.

The Facebook Timeline feature is currently in beta, so it's very possible that Facebook will change how this feature works. It would not be very hard for the social network to only list people you are still Facebook friends with.

I've asked Facebook about this little tidbit and will update this article if I hear back. I bet this is one of the things Palo Alto will want to consider tweaking before it rolls out the Timeline to everyone.

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The ability to remove and block Facebook friends is handy, but the site doesn’t make it easy to find out if other people have blocked or removed you as a friend.

That’s understandable, since finding out that a certain someone has banished you from their digital world isn’t exactly the nicest feeling in the world.

Scanning and re-scanning your friends list will only get you so far. You have to do a little detective work to ensure you haven’t got the wrong end of the stick.

After all, it might not be personal in the slightest – they may have simply deactivated or deleted their Facebook account.

11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed

The fact you’re reading this article suggests you already have an inkling that a one-time Facebook friend has kicked you to the curb.

Once you’ve established that the suspect – who you were definitely Facebook friends with at one point in the past – no longer appears in your friends list, it’s time to start digging deeper.

Your first port of call should be Messenger.

Search for the former one-time Facebook friend in your inbox and, if they’re still on Facebook and haven’t blocked you, their profile picture and name will appear under the More People heading.

When you block someone, they lose the ability to start a Facebook chat with you. So, by that reckoning, if you still have the option to message someone you’re no longer friends with – not that you’d want to – you haven’t been blocked, simply unfriended.

However, even if your suspect doesn’t appear in Messenger when you search their name, it still doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve blocked you.

They may have instead left Facebook completely. By scrolling back through your old messages, you may stumble across greyed-out profile pictures labelled Facebook User.

These belong to people who used to be Facebook friends with you, but are no longer members of the social network.

You can find out who these dormant profiles used to belong to by clicking the grey icons, reading through your message history and going for a stroll down memory lane.

While you can scan all of these and, by process of elimination, rule suspects out and establish a shortlist of people who are likely to have blocked you, doing so can be tricky and really arduous.

Facebook has, quite simply, done a good job of protecting the identities of friend blockers.

The site’s handy privacy settings, which allow you to control who can find your profile through search, who can add you as a friend, and how much of your page others can see, make it almost impossible to work out if you’ve been blocked, or if they’ve locked down their profile for everyone.

Your best bet could be to ask a mutual friend if they have access to the suspect’s profile, and compare notes on what you can see, and what they can.