One of the suggestions that surprised me most was actually someone from this board - someone with whom my only contact would be posting to the same thread. I don’t know her email address, and I can’t imagine her having mine, or ever having searched for my name. I have no SDMB contacts on my Facebook, so I can’t imagine it’s a FOAF type connection.
Could be purely coincidence I suppose, but what an unusual one if it is.
I don’t know why, but I can’t picture the terminator that Facebook sends back from the future looking anything like Ahnold.
She will be perky, cute, blonde… and deadly. “Would you like to be my friend? No? That just won’t do. You will be my friend. And the friend of all my other friends. Won’t that be fun? We can go to your place and have a slumber party! Don’t worry. I know where you live…”
Midway between Captain Janeway and a spoiled omnipotent monster-child.
Ok, I can buy that my email address was in my friend’s and cousin’s contact lists, and/or that they’ve searched for me in the past. Makes sense. But now I’m really wondering why it chose a complete stranger to be my first “friend”. Especially since there is no way the site could have made the connection that we go to the same college.
Another implication of this is that apparently Facebook has had my personal email address (as in, the one I guard on the level of a national secret) for some time, and they haven’t been spamming me asking me to join. Impressive.
Not too long ago, FB suggested I might want to be friends with a girl I dated like 3 times a year and a half ago. It freaked me right the f&ck out, because I’ve never let it paw through my [del]underwear drawer[/del] address book.
Then it dawned on me that she probably had.
I’ve always assumed it suggests friends of friends. For example, my next door neighbor’s brother popped up as a person I may know. I’ve never met him, so I can’t imagine that he’s been searching for me. My guess is that FB thought, “Oh, she knows Steve and Karen, so maybe she knows Steve’s brother too.”
I’ve noticed that some of the recommendations now pop up with a “who else knows this person” explanation, which helps.
I’ve had a couple come up with no explanation whatsoever, so I don’t know where they came from, and I don’t know them. I did actually get a friend request from somebody I’ve never heard of, and it didn’t say we had a mutual friend, so I don’t know where he found me. But most of them I can recognize as someone who is a FOAF kind of situation. I almost wish they would suggest some of my long-lost friends. I can’t find them, maybe Facebook can.
FB (as far as I know) isn’t interested in spamming outsiders to join. I’ve never seen any evidence that they harvest emails and do anything like that.
FB only looks at your yahoo/gmail/hotmail address list if you give them explicit permission to do so. If I read the docs correctly, they look once, and can’t look again unless you give them permission again to do so. FB doesn’t keep your password so they can’t go back and look at your updates. I’m sure they keep every email address they find and use that as part of the algorithm when proposing new friends.
As to why there appear to be random people in the list, that may be part of the algorithm. If you see a few people you know you may click on them and establish a sense of trust in the system. But if by chance you know one of these random people that has no other connection to your current friends list it could be a very valuable link for them. It’s fairly obvious that you know your cousin; there are probably lots of connections and they already are acting as if you know each other. But a new person, outside your normal contact group opens up new connections that they wouldn’t discover otherwise. It may be worth it to them to have a low success rate if few successes are worth more.
Certainly if you have friends in common with someone they get recommended to you and it’s clearly listed if that’s the case. It’s those people with whom you have no friends in common that people are questioning.
Are the names of college graduating classes public information?
I had something similar happen. The Neighbors are an elderly couple that like to race Corvettes, they have a couple’a twenty-something younguns that hang out with them. I sign up to facebook and the Girl is one of the first three listed. I’ve never emailed her, I didn’t even know her last name, but the firstname and avatar photo, it was her.
I suppose that’s possible. I figure Facebook could tell I’m in Portland by my IP Address, but my name, while not as common as Smith or Jones, isn’t uncommon, either. But then again, I just Googled my first & last names + Portland, and got about 1000 hits, but nothing on the first few pages indicates there’s anyone else in town that shares my full name. So I guess it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch for Facebook to match my name to the university and randomly pick another student to be my friend…
It’s all done with space age algorithms.
1960s algorithms! Impressive.
I’m not supposed to say this but Facebook is really run on a UNIVAC.
Edit: Well, except when testing the templates to make sure they viewed correctly. The used a Commodore 64 for that.
What do they use to create those annoying apps? Seems like FarmTown was designed on a 386DX with flash 4 installed.
I keep getting suggestions for “friends” that I have no clue who they are. See, I went to a huge HS and graduated quite some time ago. But FB isn’t as smart as some of you think, so it keeps recommending people from the same HS. Thing is, my kids go to the same HS as I did, so I get suggestions for people their age. I do have some friends/acquaintances in that age group, but FB wants me to have MORE!
:rolleyes:
Other than that, and this one guy whom I kissed when drunk at a HS party back in the day who seems to think we will now pick up where we left off, I like it. I ignore all drinks etc requests because I think they’re a waste of time, but I appreciate the thought from those who send them. 
When I had signed up for Facebook I had managed to find my high school (which has a fairly common name, so I had to wade through a lot of possibilities) in their listings. Interestingly enough, despite the fact that it was a Catholic all-boy’s school, Facebook kept suggesting friends “I had gone to high school with” who were female. Now, there was a girl’s school next door, and a few years ago they did merge into a single school, but that was thirty years after I graduated.
The use an Altair 8800, you have to read the fine print, but it says the apps are best used on LED binary display panels.
Slate answers your question in this week’s Dear Farhad.