Is there a way in Facebook to annotate people privately?

I don’t…think so. You don’t even want the other person to see it on their page? If you just want you and them to be the only ones, try this:

http://geekdrop.com/content/how-to-post-privately-to-someone-elses-facebook-wall-screenshot-tutorial

I don’t really understand the question to be honest, can you rephrase it?
What exactly is it that you’re trying to do? Stalking, you mean?

No, this isn’t possible. However, if you have a LOT of time on your hands, you could create your own profiles for each of the friends in question, and personalize all of the content on their pages. Just don’t let them catch you at it.

Ideally, I’d like a “notes” field attached to each of my friends, and I could put whatever text or other media I wanted to in this field. It would be available only to me. Like if they had told me their daughter liked some kind of craft project. I could note it down, and not lose it. But it’s not something they’d want to post publicly, nor would I.

Oh, like something similar to the idea of creating a diary-timeline style thing for everyone within your profile, that no one gets to see…? So it’s like multiple profiles within your profile? A folder-full-of-people’s-ID-files kind of thing?

Uhhhh….. not sure what the timeline is, but I guess you could say a diary. I think of it as data. Freeform data. I want to store it within Facebook, and I want it to appear whenever I view the profile I have attached it to. But it’s personal notes for me because i can’t remember stuff about people, and I don’t want to embarrass myself asking them all the time. Uh… where do your parents live? Are they still alive? What did they do? That sort of thing. It’s probably something only I have a problem with since I have weird memory problems and I am an information geek.

The timeline is that new stupid profile layout Facebook has…you know…an example timeline
The thing is with that timeline its possible to trace some information about that person (not to the extent of knowing whether their parents are alive, of course) but if you look at the photo, to the right there are years (2008,2009, etc.) and months zoom in ctrl + to see, and at the bottom it says ‘born’. Apparently Facebook’s objective was upon creating that timeline, they thought it would allow you ‘to share you story’, hence the cover photo and their calling it a ‘timeline’...

But when you click those all they show are old posts and activity in general. And the born just shows the birthday.
You see, the thing is, how much information you gain is up to the owner of the profile. Because it all comes down to the amount of information they share…Whether it’s their name or the name of their cat’s aunt.

As for what you’re trying to do, it’s not available on Facebook—or any other social networking site, I’d wager.
It’s more of an adobe-reader highlight-and-add-notes thing. I’m really trying to think of possible alternatives you could do to make it easier for your memory..
Perhaps you can create a database and manually update it bit by bit whenever you visit a profile, so that over time it will be complete. Plus, it’s not like you visit every single profile on your friend’s list. So you can simply, like I said before, instantly update your database upon visiting a profile. (If you’ve got a lot of free time on your hands.)

edit: PS: Hope I helped!

I use the Notes in the Address/Contacts list on my computer/smartphone for storing that kind of data.

Perhaps if there’s some sort of “sticky note” application that you can attach a note to someone’s FB profile page.

Electronic sticky note sounds plausible, @hearkat. I wonder if it exists.

I am, of course, quite fluent in databases. I used to keep this kind of information in my Access database, but now that is transferring to my phone and to google’s database. If I could link Google and Facebook, that could work. I don’t know if Google+ links to Google contacts, but everyone uses Facebook, anyway, which leaves me kind of stuck.

Failing this, is there a way of downloading Facebook contact information into other formats? Like google or really anything at all? Could you get any data out of Facebook in ascii delimited format? Does anyone these days know what ascii is any more?

@wundayatta I think I just got an idea….you know how nowadays you can link contacts on your phone/ipad/whatever to Facebook? So that when they call for example their profile picture pops up? You can do the same and transfer their information to their contact profile, and add any extra things about them manually yourself?

Interesting idea, @Luiveton. I have an Android and it uses google contacts, which can be edited from the computer. Do you, or anyone, know how to link google contacts to Facebook the way @Luiveton has suggested?

It’s a good idea although not my preferred solution. I would like to have the info pop up in Facebook, not have to be flipping back and forth between facebook and something else.

Don’t have a solution, but it sounds like it could be a useful function.

I don’t know about Android, but I do know that I already link my Facebook account with Windows Phone, so it wouldn’t surprise me. (Although Microsoft and Facebook do have more of a business relationship than Google and Facebook, so maybe not?)

I don’t know how typical this is accross other smart phone platforms (only had Windows) so I’ll just describe the basics of what I can do: I have both my email and Facebook linked to my phone, and so anyone I had an email address from (from any of my emails), and phone number, and a Facebook account, the compilation of all that information is meshed into one contact on my phone (and syncs with my email, IM account, Calendar (birthdays and events just pop up! quite nice), etc: Windows Live contacts instead of Google ones)... If your phone does have that option, it should be under some sort of “email+accounts” type option under a settings menu? That’s where my account-linking is, and there’s an option to add a Facebook account to the phone…

Now that I’m poking around at the options I have, I’m finding I can enter a lot of information about a person… (There’s even a ‘notes’ option!) but I don’t think that Facebook doesn’t do this specifically, and while my phone keeps up with my Facebook contacts, it doesn’t change or add information on my Facebook account. (On Facebook, all the information I have from people, they’ve provided. My phone is a blend of what I’ve accumulated of them and their own updating.) I can, however, message people and comment on and post things to Facebook directly from my phone.

And I know with Windows 8, there is further integration with your computer, and further integration between all the different places you interact with your contacts and schedule—it may do exactly what you want/need, (Pro version to run legacy applications), or there may be an equivalent out there currently/soon. Sorry for the semi-plug, I use more Microsoft products than anything else, so I know them more. Anyway, here, although I only scanned the page because I basically know already, is the promo Microsoft has about its People app. It’s basically an add, but it does highlight the larger things you can do with it. Hope this helps!

Thanks, @DancingMind. If I had a windows phone, I’d hop on it and check that out. I wonder if it could integrate with Access? Because that’s where I keep a lot of info, too.

I feel like this is such an obvious thing that someone must have made an app. Can you just make Facebook apps, or do you have to get Facebook to approve it? Not that I’m going into business with this, but just out of curiosity.

Something like this might work for you. I did a google search for “sticky notes to annotate web pages”, and got several hits.

Thanks @augustlan, I couldn’t access the software through the links on the blog, but it sounds like it has potential.