Network Blog Post #1
Many social networks are created through the friends of friends, or mutual friends. On social media platforms like facebook, mutual friends are suggested to you based on the friends in your network. In the grazia daily discussion, How Does Facebook Suggested Friends Actually Work, people try to analyze the methods that facebook uses in order to enhance its suggested and mutual friends algorithm. They suggest that facebook uses the location and activity of each user, but in reality, Facebook just evaluates ties between current friends in every user’s friend list.
As discussed in the course, facebook evaluates strong ties between a group of friends in order to decide which other friends to suggest to them. For example, one you friend someone, their list of friends starts to appear on your list because of that mutual friend. As you friend more people, facebook tries to find people that you have many mutual friends with. The article also talks about facebook trying to satisfy the Strong Triadic Closure property. They do this by evaluating which friends most likely have strong ties to one person, by how long they’ve been friends or active between each other. They then try to suggest that person’s strong friends to each other, in order to complete the triangle. This would also bring more mutual friends and grow the network of many facebook users.
https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/real-life/facebook-suggested-friends-work/