How Does Facebook Suggest Friends?
In Udemy’s online blog post, “How Does Facebook Suggests Friends?” author Cate Leona gives multiple examples of awkward and unexpected friend requests Facebook suggests to its users. In one incident, Facebook suggested to a young woman, a guy whom she formerly had a short-lived romance with, 10 years later after they had met. Friend suggestions of people who seemingly have no mutual friends in common appear, as in this case in which both parties also lived on different continents. Even stranger is when Facebook suggests friends for people who do not even have a Facebook. So how exactly do friends become suggested to one another on the internet’s most popular social media site?
The process is not random but actually very strategic and algorithmic. One great source of data is friends from high school and the work place. Facebook will look into not only your own pool of friends and co-works but those around you as well. This means that even if you choose to not disclose any information about your high school, if your siblings display their information, Facebook will still make that connection between their network of friends and yours. When you stalk the profile of that person you’d had a crush on, well as their Likes and activities Facebook makes a note of those things and makes a suggestion. This collection of data based on the user’s activities, Likes, and preferences is a great marketing tool as it allows businesses to advertise to specific people as well as friends who have similar Likes and preferences.
Leona’s blog post relates to the earlier topics we talked about in class, especially on network structure, the triadic closure property, and matching and marketing. Since some of Facebook’s suggestions appear because of mutual friends people have in common, it makes sense for Facebook to suggest two people as friends who also have a good mutual friend in common. This relates back to the triadic closure property which states if one person has strong ties with its two neighbors, those neighbors should have at least a weak tie between them. The marketing strategy businesses use on Facebook is a much more complicated version of Chapter 10’s content on Matching and Markets where product are matched with consumers based on their specific interests and marketed in an effective way that targets those consumers’ friends as well. Both examples relate to the broad topic of network structure in which analysis of friend networks helps Facebook make sometimes good (and sometimes creepy) friend suggestions and helps businesses market effectively on social media.
https://www.udemy.com/blog/how-does-facebook-suggest-friends/