Friend Wheel - FAQ

All of these questions have been asked several times, usually through Facebook messages.

Q: What is it?
A: It's a wheel. On the outside are all of your friends. If two people are linked together, it means that they are friends with each other.

Q: How's it work?
A: It uses the Facebook Development Platform to retrieve your friends and all of the links between them. This information is then used to draw the wheel image.
PHP and the GD extensions for drawing are used for Friend Wheel.

Q: Why don't all of my friends show up?
A: It's probably due to their privacy settings. If they've blocked either all applications, or Friend Wheel specifically, or if they've blocked non-friends from seeing their friend list, then they won't show up on anyone's Friend Wheel.
The relevant pages to check are application privacy and search privacy.

Q: Why is there a limit of 400 friends?
A: A few reasons.
Firstly, the wheel would look far too crowded and be impossible to read (this is already often the case at 400 friends).
Secondly, it would take even longer to generate. As the number of friends, N, goes up, then number of possible links goes up much faster (N squared). The sorting algorithms also take longer to work when there are more friends to be sorted. Some wheels with 400 friends already take about 60 seconds to generate. If it were increased much further past 400 it could take several minutes to generate a single wheel.

Q: How do I update my Friend Wheel to show new friends?
A: Follow these steps whenever you make a new friend:
1) Click on "Friend Wheel" in the applications side-bar on the left (or visit http://apps.facebook.com/friendwheel)
2) Choose your settings.
3) Click Generate at the bottom.
4) Your new wheel will replace your old one on your profile.

Q: Why doesn't it update automatically?
A: There is no way to generate a new wheel automatically whenever you make a new friend. The best we could do is to regenerate it once per day. To regenerate everyone's wheels once per day, we'd need a much faster server (around ten times faster than the current one) which costs money.
It's a possibility that this will be added in the future, but for now you'll just have to regenerate it manually. Sorry.

Q: Why did you make Friend Wheel?
A: See this page.

Q: Why doesn't this FAQ answer my question?
A: Perhaps it's not asked frequently enough. Send me a facebook message with your question and I'll get back to you.

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