If you are a friend of someone on Facebook, you can always visit their profile page to know what’s common between you and that user. You’ll get know about your mutual friends as well the various pages on Facebook that are liked by both of you.

Facebook recently extended this idea with the launch of Friendship Pages. Now you get to explore photographs in which both of you are tagged, events that you may have attended together, and every single word that was ever exchanged between you and your friend on Facebook through wall posts, status updates or comments.

If the friendship pages are not enabled for your Facebook account yet, you may use the following URL:

http://www.facebook.com/Xuser?and=Yuser

Replace Xuser and Yuser with their respective Facebook Profile IDs (or vanity names).

Facebook says that you’ll be able to see a friendship page if you are friends with one of the people and have permission to view both people’s profiles. That means, you can also explore friendship pages of a friend and a non-friend.

To give you an example, I am connected with Om Malik who in turn is a friend of Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook.

Therefore, my friendship page with Om will be available at facebook.com/AgarwalAmit?and=OmMalik while a URL like facebook.com/Sheryl?and=OmMalik will display list of Facebook friends and likes common to both Om and Sheryl.

Opting Out?

Friendship Pages on Facebook are not exactly a privacy nightmare but if you would still like to opt-out, here’s a way.

Go to Account -> Privacy Settings and click “View Settings” under the Basic Directory Information section. Set the visibility settings of “See my friend list” and “See my interests and other Pages” to “Friends Only” and now strangers, even with one-degree of separation, won’t be able to see your data through Friendship pages.