Facebook: WTH?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ve been resisting joining. A few months ago a friend of mine, who had also been resisting, broke down and joined, and ever since she’s been telling me I need to join.

Earlier tonight she sent me an email via Facebook announcing some pictures she’d posted, and her personal note said “It’s time. Get your ass on this thing.” How could I resist that?

Ok, so I’m signing up, I enter my name and high school, and it presents me with three people “I might know.” This was before it asked to access my email client (to which I said no anyway).

I have no idea who the first person is.

The second person is a friend I’ve known for about 30 years. Not some long-lost acquaintance. We did go to the same high school, but she graduated the Spring before my freshman year. And our families are still close - my parents are her little brother’s godparents.

The third person is my cousin. Out of 16 cousins, she is the one I am closest to. However, she’s ten years older than me, and we grew up in different areas anyway - she went to high school 150 miles away from where I went.

So how the hell did Facebook come up with these people, knowing only my name and high school? I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had come up with old friends from school, but how on Earth did it pick two people that are actually pretty important in my life? And for that matter, what’s with the random third person? If it was that good with two, why did it come up with a stranger for the third?

Oh, and #2 and #3 have never met each other, and after I’d finished signing up, the site again presented me with people I might know; #1 showed up again, and it said he’s a student at my university. (And wait a minute - I just thought of this! The site had no way of knowing I attend that school when it presented him the first time!) Anyway, my point is, I’m in Portland, #2 is in the Bay Area, and #3 is in Sacramento; I am 100% positive that #1 is not a “friend” of either #2 or #3.

So, enough of my rambling. The mind boggles! Is it magic?

2

I don’t know, but it seems to know who my ex-boyfriends are. It keeps suggesting them as friends.

3

Probably sheer chance, but I wouldn’t surprised if Facebook looks at the data they’ve entered and see’s that before they’ve mentioned someone by the name of <yourname> before and weighted the results.

4

This is the only explanation I can find. I found this on some other forum where people were trying to figure out the same problem. This girl saw the same thing and was asking one of her friends about his facebook experience:

So it’s possible those people were looking for you on Facebook, couldn’t find you, but Facebook remembers. Oh yes. It remembers.

5

I suspect it does the same thing with the ‘search’ function. If you search a person’s name repeatedly, the program assumes you know each other and suggests them as a friend. I had a friend’s ‘fake’ account suggested because apparently that friend had been looking at my profile with it. Kind of says a lot about that friend…

6

I’ve wondered about this too and thought perhaps it saves data from people searching for you. There have been people suggested that I do indeed know, but that Facebook logically would have no way of connecting to me. I am talking people from 3 different countries, some personal connections, some professional, and 1 that was a long distance friend that I had lost touch with several years ago.

Hmm. Maybe it is magic after all.

7

I agree, It seems to recommend people that have searched for you or clicked on your profile from someone else’s friends list. It tells facebook they have a connection to you.

8

The simplest mechanism is if your email address is in other people’s address books. Once it knows that, it can easily suggest them to you and vice versa.

9

It is magic. They don’t talk much about the tech classes they offer at Hogwarts.

10

I was just about to post pretty much this exact OP.

While we’re on the subject, what if you’re mainly interested in using Facebook for business purposes? I signed up to do that, and now find myself inundated with useless “chatter”. Maybe I just don’t get this. OK, I’m officially old.

11

What kind of business purposes are you interested in? FB can be useful if you’re trying to promote a business, but if you’re more interested in networking then you’re better off with LinkedIn.

12

The people they recommend as friends are usually people who are mutual friends of your friends. Now in your case it’s a little more challenging since presumably you didn’t have any friends upon signing up, so perhaps it just chose some friends of the friend that told you to sign up?

13

Does this mean I can screw with people then by just randomly looking at their profiles every few days, even people I don’t know? That would be awesome. I always wondered why someone would show up that has zero connections to me that I can see, no common friends, no common school, not in the same area, or even the same state!

14

Not necessarily. Everyone chooses their own levels of privacy, so in many, MANY cases, you can’t look at their profile at all without already being friends. In those cases, you see their name, photo, and list of friends. That’s it.

15

If you ever really look at a Facebook URL, there’s all sorts of goodies thrown in. They “ref” nearly everything, storing a vast arsenal of data to be used against you at some later date.

16

Facebook is creepy. When I signed up, it suggested as a friend a girl I knew via Match.com (we communicated via email, met once). I haven’t had any contact with her in 5 years. I do not have her email anywhere (nor old messages). Oh, and she lives on a different continent entirely. How it paired us, I have no idea.

Like I said, creepy.

17

I don’t know which will be worse for humanity. If skynet is the product of military research or an automated social networking site.

18

You might find some answers here.

19

As mentioned above, she may have had your email address in her address book.

20

Correct. I mistakenly thought it was another address. Curious though. Say she did have an old free address of mine (say hotmail). If I stopped using it, then hotmail deletes the account. I wonder if Facebook could still track down via it?