Facebook’s Friend Suggestions, a freaky phenomenon

Posted By Afif Fattouh on October 12th, 2009

Facebook is constantly evolving, adding features to its 300 million users worldwide on a regular basis. Wall, Status, Pokes and Photos were the main features of the site. Later a News Feed was announced just to be followed by the instant messaging application called Chat. Overtime Facebook significantly changed its user interface to create a cleaner look, and recently the site announced Facebook Lite, a faster and simpler version.

One of the biggest challenges on social networking sites is the loss of new users that are not able to connect immediately with other members. Facebook’s answer to this dilemma is “Friend Suggestions”. The feature is achieved using a very complex algorithm that suggests users you are likely to know based on the networks you are a part of, mutual friends, work and education information, and “many other factors”.

The feature is freaky and sometimes Facebook suggests a person that you definitely know but you don’t have mutual friends or share similar interests with, so how does it work? We are concerned here with the “many other factors” and what they consist of. But first I’ll explain how the process works based on the obvious factors mentioned above.

Every user creates her profile to perfection, entering personal information such as interests and activities. All these bits of information are stored, analyzed and compared to other user’s personal information, combined with the mutual friend matches, it makes the decision whether you may know the person or not. It’s important to note that it’s a two-way process, meaning that you could be the central user initiating the calculations by finding matches depending on your details, or you could be on the other end of the process where your profile is stumbled upon because you share an interest or a mutual friend with the central user. Therefore the algorithm establishes a relationship.

The “many other factors” involves Friend Finder, where you enter your email such as Gmail or Hotmail to see if any of your contacts are already registered based on their email address. Even if you choose to skip the contacts you have imported, Facebook will still store your relationship with those contacts. Facebook clearly states that it will not store your password, but it doesn’t tell you that it will store all your contacts even if you chose to skip them.

Facebook also forms relationships based on other people’s imported contact lists, meaning that even if you’ve never imported your own lists, Facebook sees your address in other people’s contact lists and figures out relationships based on that.

Privacy concerns are always an issue in the business of online activities, and social networking is no different. Knowing what personal information is shared with the sites you visit is certainly essential, but it’s arguable that user’s privacy is measured according to her preferences. Websites store information about the visitors and registered users all the time and it’s up to the user to understand the issues involved, and to realize that most of them are claiming to be free services, and in a sens they are, although the information they collect is valuable to their continuity.