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Live Chat with anyone on Facebook (even non friends)
62 points by weakwire on March 11, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 34 comments
Messed around a bit and i found something really interesting. You can chat live with anyone at facebook even people you are not connected.

You can even see when the other party is typing and read your message.

First find his facebook id. You can do it at http://findmyfacebookid.com/ or any other service.

http://www.facebook.com/othelis ---> id= 699313289

Open you browser's console at facebook and type

Chat.openTab(id) eg. Chat.openTab(699313289)

You can live chat with strangers and non friends now and get notified when they read your message!



I have two Facebook accounts that are complete strangers to each other.

When I sent a message from one to the other one, message didn't pop up. It was in "Others" section of my account inbox.

So it's basically a normal message that you can send to anyone now. Even Zuck


Facebook IM Roulette

Chat.openTab(Math.floor(Math.random() * 100000000))


Chat.openTab(~~(Math.random() * 1e8))


Interesting...

Chat with Mark Zuckerberg:

  javascript:Chat.openTab(4)


haha, pls do it and report back


Did you?


This is not surprising because Facebook treats chat and messages as the same. They both end up in the same thread. So as you can send a message to anybody, you can "chat" with anybody. Whatever you wrote will be received in their inbox as a regular message.

I am not sure what happens with people who choose not to receive messages from the public though.


Ouch.

I can't help but think that somewhere at Facebook there's a huge fire-drill going on right now.


I am wondering why the OP decided to post it here, rather than try and get a bug bounty (edit: assuming it's a genuine issue, seems like maybe it isn't). It would probably be worth a fair amount...certainly a few thousand at least. Facebook are normally pretty happy for you to disclose after they fix it, so you can still get the PR...


After I commented, I flagged the post. I'm not comfortable with this being on HN. FB should have a chance to fix it.

On the plus side, the entire thing may just be a misunderstanding. Other commenters are pointing out that it doesn't really live message them if you're not friends, just regular messages them -- which you could do anyway. It's just the UI appears that you are live messaging.

We'll see. But you're right -- very odd to post that here with a reward being easily available.


Confirming it's the default behavior. After some googling this call is known on the internet. It's just a shortcut to the original(quite hidden) behavior. Check comments below with "FacebookChatRoulette". It's interesting how easy and automated can be to send a msg to anyone. So that raises some concerns. Definetly not a bug ..


Yeah it's called "oh look, a HN article, whatever ignore it, we'll fix it next year, and nobody will give a shit"


This is no different than navigating to that person's page and clicking on the 'Message' button. It's not a vulnerability.


You can see when is typing or if he/she read your message


After you send a message, you can select open in chat from the actions drop down.


You can also get someone's Facebook ID via this URL: http://graph.facebook.com/user_name_here


This isn't news. Chat and messaging are one and the same. You can message anyone, and you can migrate conversations arbitrarily between the chat and message UI, or even both at the same time. If you message someone who you don't have good reason to message, facebook will classify it as spam and send it to their "other" box.


Facebook id number 1, 2 and 3 do not exists.


Because Mark deleted them after he made sure his POSTs are working


Probably some protected super-user accounts.


http://www.businessinsider.com/the-first-20-people-to-sign-u...

Here are some fun people you can chat with. I felt kinda bad bugging Zuck with a message but how could I resist?


http://findmyfacebookid.com/ is a way to find real human users of facebook and currently using facebook.


http://findmyfacebookid.com is just a mean to get fb id. http://graph.facebook.com/user_name_here is the official way to to that


Noooo Chat and Messaging are the same thing, and you've always been able to message strangers. Just go to their profile and hit "message".


can you see when they receive the message and when there are typing? Also it appears on the main chat window?


I think it has already been fixed. It's not working for me anymore. Too bad, I was having fun.


Go to the users page and click 'message'. It's the exact same thing.


Holy crap, it really works


yeap!


But don't work like it should. The chat only appears to the addressee if he opens a chat box to chat with you ..


In my case it opens instantly..


works for me. it requires a valid id.


ZukerBerg would be getting more money for getting hits for this bullshit too....why would he want to debug it???


Oops it worked for me...!




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