Anybody have a sense of how those friends are picked for your wall?
Some of mine are people I’d expect to see, as I’ve visited their walls recently (or they’ve posted on mine). But others aren’t.
I’m fascinated by this myself, and am actually collecting data on who displays in these ‘boxes’ and trying to keep track of whom I view/publicly respond to.
I recently switched over to Timeline, so how Friends are displayed is completely different than on the Wall format (where you had a ‘Top 10’ to the left, but the actual Friends List was alphabetized and didn’t give you any info).
From what I’ve noticed so far, the algorithm seems to be quite different for the 6 friends displayed at the very top center, and the 6 displayed in the box to the right (as well as my top 18 or so friends when you click through to my friend’s list).
The actual friends list and the display box to the right, shuffles those friends I have had both many (over time) and frequent public interactions with, to the top. I recently made some newer (work) friends who I interact with a great deal on Facebook, and so far only the two I’ve been friends with the longest have ever made it into the top 18 of my List; I expect the others will move up as our interactions increase in total number, rather than just in frequency.
However there are several notable and unexplained exceptions to this general rule. One is some guy I have a crush on whose profile who I have visited a great deal, but we have ery infreqent interactions (just 'like’ing a post here and there); one is kind of a creeper, that I do not have any interaction with, or look at his profile, so WTF; one a childhood best friend, who I also do not interact with publicly or privately, nor look at her profile.
On the other hand, the top center friends box, with just the icons, is heavily influenced by people I message privately. It also tends to preferentially display those who have most recently posted anything to me, and by who is online/available to chat at any given moment.
Again though there are a few people who display there repeatedly, who I have compatively little interaction with - most of them are not in the top 25 of my actual friends list. And three of them, of them, I know for a fact are often on Facebook, read what I post, and look at my pictures (because they mention things I’ve put on FB IRL all the time!).
So IMO, it’s plausible that simply viewing my content contributes to certain friends being displayed on my profile/high on my List. Which is… intriguing.
I’m testing part of this theory by picking two random friends to ‘creep on’ - clicking through to their profile and content daily at least. If my level of interest in them as determined by views is a major factor, they should move up in popularity in my friends list at least…
Thanks for your insights! I’m interested in hearing more about what you learn.
Slightly off topic, but the “people you may know” seems to have a couple of different iterations, presumably delivered randomly:
- People with numbers of mutual friends.
- This is the weird one: people who have looked at your profile recently.
According to Facebook, number 2 is not meant to be true, but I proved it to myself accidentally last week by setting up a fake account and then viewing my real account. Within a day, the fake account, which has no friends and absolutely no connection whatsoever to my real one, was showing up in the “people you may know” box. (This also explains why my ex girlfriend started showing up there before I blocked her.)
They might have triggered on your IP address. If you repeatedly come in on the same IP, it’s a reasonable guess you share an internet connection and know that person.
It’s a reasonable theory, but I connect via 3G, and my IP address not only changes every couple of hours, but those IP blocks are shared with tens of thousands of other people. Yet I only find the one fake account I created as well as (in the past) an ex girlfriend. Seems fishy to me.
What e-mail did you use to create the fake account?
A spam-ridden hotmail account I use only for signing up to things and I haven’t used in earnest for more than ten years. I didn’t link it to Facebook via ‘friend finder’, nor have I ever linked my primary Gmail account to Facebook.
Something else weird happened on my real FB account last night: I got three email notifications saying “[Person who hasn’t used Facebook for one year] updated their status to ‘[The status I posted on St. Patrick’s Day]’”. Three different people, none of whom has updated their account since April 2011 and none of whom I have ever actually interacted with on Facebook, let alone having asked for email notifications about. The notifications, which were email-only and not noted on FB, used the exact words of my status, which was absolutely unique, and which they definitely haven’t actually posted.
My password is an astonishingly long one with lots of odd characters and I’d describe it with a fair degree of confidence as essentially uncrackable, so I’m pretty confident my account hasn’t been compromised.
Very odd, and the first glitch I’ve ever seen coming from the system.