Inappropriate Friend Suggestions on Facebook
For those students and faculty that use Facebook, it is often a convenience when there are friend suggestions on the right-hand side of the screen. Normally, these are friends of friends or people that may be in a common group. In many cases this friend generator is how users grow their network and increase the value of the site itself. This is because Facebook and other social networking sites gain value as the number of users increase and those users connect with each other.
One unfortunate phenomenon for users is when the suggested friends are more like enemies. In class we discussed that the way the network finds suggested friends is based on the number of mutual friends and distance from the user. This view of networks and relationships works in the sense that it is often connecting people that users have been associated with before, but the site cannot evaluate the nature of these relationships. Some examples from class and the textbook show the nature of friendly and enemy relationships and can make a network balanced or unbalanced. Since Facebook cannot know the nature of a relationship it is very likely that the suggested friends may be an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend. In some cases, since email contacts are a variable in finding new friends, the contacts may be more professional than personal. This may make some users uncomfortable at the thought of their boss seeing photos of them with their friends in a much less formal setting than the workplace.
The figure above demonstrates how a very small network is structured when the nature of a relationship is factored in. Since the information that Facebook uses to connect users is limited to existing friends and email contacts, there is no way to know whether two users may be friends or enemies. To read more about this and how it is affecting Facebook users, go to http://www.nbcnews.com/id/31684082/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/facebook-why-not-give-your-ex-another-shot/#.VBX3bfldVps