Facebook: Suggesting Friends Beyond Its Walls
Facebook, as a social networking entity, has become part of our society and every person in it, whether we know it or not. As a user adds more and more “friends,” Facebook creates a structure that consists of the connections between all of those who have made an account. Over time since the site’s creation, the various algorithms that track these connections have become more successful at accurately suggesting friends that one should add. Recently, Facebook has even been doing well at connecting its users to people who actually have not signed up.
The feature on Facebook that gives suggestions of users to others, which has been called names such as “suggested friends” and “people you may know,” has caused me to think about the “strong triadic closure property.” The definition of this principle says that if two people have a strong connection to another, they must have some sort of connection between them, regardless of whether it is weak or strong. For example, if person A has a strong relationship with person B and person C, there must be a connection between B and C.
I wondered about the validity of the strong triadic closure property, and Facebook reinforced it to me. Looking back at the example with persons A, B, and C, it is easy to see how this is true. If A is good friends with B, it is likely that B will post often on A’s Facebook wall. Additionally, it is likely that C will do the same if he is good friends with A, too. If B and C visit A’s Facebook page frequently, they will have a great chance of seeing the other, thus creating the connection between them, even if it is weak.
That example, among many other factors, is how Facebook recommends friends to you as “people you may know.” The more interactions that happen between two people, the stronger their relationship will be to the website. If one friend is seen networking regularly with two others, and those two are not friends with each other, there will be a link between them. Facebook will follow this and suggest that the two add one another.
Facebook’s ways of connecting people, though, goes beyond the people who have made their own accounts. After reading Steven Cherry’s interview with the author of “One Plus One Makes Three (for Social Networks),” Katharina Anna Zweig, I am aware of how Facebook is able to reach out to those without accounts and suggest friends that they know. This may seem impossible because it is hard to believe that Facebook has non-members in their networking web, but Katharina has found that it is through the contact lists in their member’s email accounts that the website is able to find these people.
Though Facebook is merely a website, it is clear that its influence has permeated through many facets of society and how people interact with each other. It will be interesting to see how much farther the internet conglomerate can go to connect the people we see every day, or those we may not even know yet.