Custom Profiles

Facebook and Myspace, the two most popular social networking sites on the Internet, have many things in common: personal profiles, friends, photos, and status updates to name a few. One of the most noticeable differences, however, is the fact that Myspace allows its users to customize their profiles, whereas Facebook does not.

Because of this difference, many people have tried to find ways to customize their Facebook profiles, and a few have been able to do successfully. However, whenever anyone has been able to find a way to customize their profile, Facebook has made it impossible to do it through the method each person used. Because of Facebook’s ability to block out the various methods of customizing one’s profile, it is not possible to create a fully functioning customized profile.

Altering CSS with Embedded JavaScript

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a language that allows web programmers to define the styles for a given web page, or even many pages all at the same time. The CSS can be located within the HTML element that it is supposed to modify (like a paragraph of text), it can be defined near the top of the HTML file so that it applies to the entire page, or it can be located in a completely separate file, which allows for the same CSS file to be used to define styles for multiple web pages.

Since CSS is what sets the styles for web pages, it’s the CSS that needs to be altered in order to customize your profile. There is only one way to change the CSS of a page that would affect anyone that views it, and it involves using JavaScript.

JavaScript has built-in access to the CSS styles of a web page, making it very easy to change the look of the page. All this method involves is using the JavaScript to set a few styles, and then embedding that JavaScript into your Facebook profile page. In fact, back in 2006, someone did just that: they embedded JavaScript in the Hometown field of their profile, which applied customized CSS to their profile.

Here’s the problem with using JavaScript to alter the styles of your profile page: Facebook does not allow you to embed JavaScript into your profile. They may have allowed it (accidentally) in 2006, but they fixed that problem the moment they found out about it. Whatever information you put into your profile, Facebook checks and treats it as plain text, rendering any HTML or JavaScript you type into it useless.

It’s for this reason that profile trackers also do not work.

Applications

Since changing the styles of your profile yourself is impossible, can applications do the trick?

By design, applications are only allowed to affect the style of the box that they inhabit. For those of you who know how CSS works, Facebook achieves this by prefixing each of the rules in the CSS with the ID of the application. Therefore, if you try to apply a style to paragraph tags, like setting the background color to red, you may type this:

p { background-color: red; }

But after Facebook processes it, it ends up looking something like this:

#box_app_2361343200 p { background-color: red;}

This means that only paragraph tags within your application box will be affected, nothing else on the profile will change.

In 2007, there was an application that found a way around this by making their box take up the entire page and then recreate the profile with its own styles. However, this only allowed for a limited profile, and Facebook quickly made it so that this technique could no longer work.

There is an application made by fbexpressions.com that “works”, but it just displays a large picture within its box on your profile, not affecting anything else on the page. The pictures the site provide look nice, but it clearly isn’t something that actually customizes your profile.

Plug-ins

There are some customizers that apparently do work, but the problem is that you need to install a plug-in on your browser in order to see any customizations. In addition, in order for anyone else to see your customizations, they would also need to install the plug-in. I don’t know how well these plug-ins actually work, but even if they do, most people aren’t going to add the plug-in necessary to see your customized profile, so it really isn’t worth the time. Additionally, everyone would probably need the same plug-in to see others’ customized profiles, since different plug-ins are typically implemented a bit differently, or at least enough not to be able to work together.

Groups and Pages

Though the above methods either work in a very limited way or not at all, many people still join groups claiming that they have working profile customizers. The important thing to remember about these groups and pages is that their goal is usually to do one or more of four things: grow as large as possible, hack your Facebook account, steal your identity, and sometimes, spread viruses.

For example, the four major groups and pages I came across on Facebook that promised a profile customizer all required you to join and to invite all your friends (or at least 200 of them). They claim that you have to do this in order for something to be “activated” or something. This couldn’t be further from the truth. There is no way for them to keep track of when you join, how many friends you invite and how many of those friends actually join, so if you’re counting on getting that automatic e-mail or notification once your two-hundredth friend joins the group, don’t hold your breath.

With regards to hacking your profile, many groups will direct you to a separate web site that requires you to enter your log-in information in order for it to work. While there are legitimate applications that do need this information, they will do this through something called Facebook Connect, which opens up in a separate window when they ask for your information. The illegitimate ones will either ask for your information without mentioning Facebook Connect or they will fake it by either showing it in the same window or opening it in a separate one, but with a URL that does not belong to Facebook. If you do not see Facebook Connect mentioned or see it mentioned on a page whose URL does not belong to Facebook, DO NOT enter your information. If you do, you have just given a hacker your e-mail and password, with which they can access your account and use it for their own purposes. See the article on phishing for more information.

As for identify theft, one group leads you to a website that requires you to fill out a lot of personal information before being able to see an instructional video, or you can pay them $1 through PayPal. To try to prove that their method worked, they posted three photos of their supposedly customized profiles, but the pictures were clearly faked, and if you clicked through to their profiles, none of them were customized.

Finally, one group required you to download a program from another site in order for their customizer to work. While this may work (for only you and whoever else has downloaded the program), it’s very possible (and likely) that what you are downloading is a Trojan – a legitimate program that comes along with a virus. Legitimate Facebook applications do not need anything to be downloaded for them to work, so if a group or application tells you that you need to download something, DO NOT trust them.

Summary

None of the methods of customizing a profile discussed here actually works, and there is no other way of implementing a fully working profile customizer that lets anyone see the changed profile without having to add any plug-ins or download anything. Even if someone is able to come up with something that works (which would have to be through some hole in Facebook’s security), you can trust that Facebook will waste no time in plugging the hole, as they have done several times before.

The truth is that unless Facebook wants its users to be able to customize their profiles, they will not let anything actually work fully. Honestly, I can’t blame them – I’ve seen too many Myspace profile pages mangled by users that didn’t know what they were doing to want to go back there ever again. Until Facebook allows profile customization, don’t trust anything that says it can customize your profile. At the very least it just won’t work, but the worst case scenario could mean the loss of your Facebook account and even your identity.