I find this thread hilarious.
I imagine if this board was around in the mid-80’s we’d be dealing with threads complaining about programming those new-fangled VCR’s. “Why is it always flashing 12:00??? It’s 3:30!”
Lamia-If you have 1 mutual friend, you still get “person you may know”.
Except that this is a thread full of at least internet literate folks, if not computer geeks. It’s not that we don’t “get” social media or how to post on a site with a well designed or intuitive interface (er…my post is my cite).
I think it’s more like my whining a few years ago that with my DVR I couldn’t watch one show and record another, while my creaky old VCR let me do that two decades before! (Dual channel DVR’s finally put a rest to that complaint, thank goodness.) It’s not that I don’t *understand *the technology, it’s that the technology kinda sucks.
Yes, I know. The friend finder also seems to take into account things like how recently you added the mutual friend and whether you and the suggested friend live in the same area/went to the same school/work for the same employer, but I don’t know what their formula actually is and I didn’t feel the need to get into all that when trying to explain what “Find Friends” was to someone who was confused on the subject.
Yeah, I see “you may know”, and think,“Um, actually I don’t.”
The only facebook annoyance I have right now is that it doesn’t show updates from all friends. There is a list of maybe 50 people whose stuff shows up in my newsfeed. I can take people off this list and put other people on, but I cannot select more than 50. I want EVERYBODY. Well, not everybody, but everybody I actually know or find interesting, and that’s more than 50 people.
True. But most people just leave the default settings. I have access to three accounts, and fiddled around with the settings to see what shows up, and what doesn’t. If it’s from a third party and/or has a picture, most of your friends will see what you ‘like’.
Facebook is actually extraordinarily un-intuitive. I have to agree with the OP on this one. And what makes things worse is that they’re constantly tweaking and changing the user interface without ever publicizing these changes, so it’s this constant process of trial-and-error to figure out how the site works. I honestly think this is completely deliberate, because if you don’t quite understand how, for example, all of the privacy settings work, it’s harder for you to shut out sponsored pages and advertisements and so forth, and of course Facebook wants you to see those things.
Here’s how things work right now, by the way, as far as what things other people can see. This is as of today. For all I know, tomorrow it might change. 
When you comment on or Like a friend’s photo or status update, check to see what the privacy settings are on that status update or photo. This will be visible next to the timestamp at the bottom of the post. It might look like a silhouette of a person, or like a globe, or like a little gear. Hover over it, and it will say who the post is visible to: Public, Friends of Friends, Friends Only, or Custom.
If you Like or comment on a Public post, then your Like or comment will show up IN THE FEED of every person who is friends with your friend.
Example: I go to Facebook. I look at my news feed. In this feed it says “Mary Jones commented on Jason Brown’s photo!” and the photo, along with Mary’s comment, shows up for me. I’m friends with Mary. I’m not friends with Jason. Why did the post show up for me? Because Jason set the privacy on that photo to either Public or Friends of Friends.
What this effectively means is that if you Like or comment on any Public or Friends of Friends post, a shitload of people that you don’t know are going to see your comment appear in their feed. Some people don’t care about that, which is fine, but I think it’s nice to know.
If the privacy on the post is set to Friends Only, then whatever you Like or comment will only show up in the feeds of people who are both your friend and the other person’s friend. (In the previous example, if I were friends with BOTH Jason and Mary, I’d have seen her comment even if Jason set the privacy on the photo to Friends Only.)
I hope this makes sense. It would probably be easier with screenshots but I don’t care quite enough to go that far for an explanation.
Facebook also reads the contacts in your phone (if you have the app of course). That is the only explanation for the fact that it has suggested people to me that it would have no other way of knowing I may know them.
Being in South Florida, every time I see a Timeline layout, I think about the old Butterfly Ballot. Certainly a good example of something to model a communications scheme after! 
-D/a
Possibly those people have given Facebook access to their email contacts, and if you’re in there, that’s another way it could know.
FB is easily understood if you think of it as a dumbed-down, common-denominator environment. It makes it easy to do what most people are there to do most of the time, and damn hard to do anything else.
On a cell phone applications can easily access your contacts. Android apps will tell you that in the permissions list before you install them, but there is still no granular control if you want to refuse that one permission. You wouldn’t need to supply a password or anything. Once the app is installed it could be very subtle in its request to read your contacts or possibly not ask you at all.
I used an open browser window to watch the trailer for Prometheus, I didn’t log in to FB or log in at all or click anything related to FB.
The person who had apparently been logged into FB in the open browser session then had constant updates posted on their wall from movie PR accounts, they never figured out how to get rid of them as defriending didn’t work.
I have no clue what I did, the invasiveness of FB is creepy!
Any idea how to avoid the timeline crap.
I liked it the old way, now when I log in, it’s the new way. A trial, or some shit, I can only choose ‘convert now’ which is the opposite of what I want to do.
I just want it shutoff and go back to the old way where it still made a little bit of sense to me. Now I’m contemplating closing my account because I hate it so much.
Sorry, once you’ve switched (voluntarily or not) there’s no going back.
I know; I was just suggesting another possibility.
Facebook Purity. It doesn’t actually change it back, but it will reorganize how you see pages, amongst other things.
I’m pretty sure it’s deliberate. Facebook doesn’t have to be intuitive to get you to use it, because it is practically ubiquitous. So the only thing they have to worry about are their advertisers. And, as I’ve repeatedly read, Facebook gets more money from its advertisers by pointing out not only how many people see their ads, but how long these people are even on Facebook, and thus available for advertising. It’s the same reason why Facebook goes around buying things like Instagram when people were spending more time there. (And I suspect Pinterest will go that way too, assuming they can resolve the legal problem of people posting pics they don’t own.
The thing I personally find annoying is that, for some stupid reason, to get to your friends list, you have to go to your own profile, and then click on your friends list. I think they want you to have to scroll through your feed, where all the apps do all their advertising.