This keeps happening: Facebook suggests “People you may know”. I just got a suggestion for a person I have genuinely never heard of, with whom I share 10 mutual friends.
The weirdest one was a name I have heard a couple of times, but have never knowingly met, but with whom I share no less than 23 mutual friends.
How does this happen in life? I presume this happened a lot before Facebook but we weren’t aware of it. Would we have gone to our graves never having heard of these people?
Does this happen to anyone else, or am I just unusual because I’ve moved country so many times?
I was friended by a person I apparently went to high school with, who knows virtually ALL of my close friends from high school. I have absolutely no memory of this person existing. I decided to roll with it, and, actually he’s one of my more amusing FB friends.
It’s wierd though. How do I not remember this guy if he was friends with all my friends?
It’s high school where the 10-mutuals comes from for me too.
I also got a friend request last week from someone I’ve never heard of but with seven mutual friends. I friended him anyway because on enquiry he was one of my brother’s friends at school. But I don’t think I ever actually met the [del]loser[/del] guy.
That happened to me, too. This guy is a social butterfly, went to all the parties I went to just at different times, and knew different groups of my friends who don’t know each other. Weeeeird.
I friended him after I eventually did meet him at a party. He spams Facebook and I had to mute him.
What extra strange is that the friends we have in common are not facebook sluts who just friend anyone. They basically only friend people they actually know and like. So the explanation (quite reasonable in many cases) that they must have friended a zillion random people, doesn’t hold true in my case.
Before “Social Networks” meant stuff like facebook it was a study area of sociology. I was involved in a project once mapping the connections between large groups of people. People would be nodes with lines between nodes indicating that the people know each other.
One of the projects was walking the graph looking for “cliques” which was a term of art meaning a set of people were each person in the set knew every other person in the set. It wasn’t unusual to find nodes that would be a member of a clique except for a single link, which is what you’re describing here.
I know the PhDs involved were always trying to draw conclusions about people (like how likely they were to be a smoker or have aids or something) according to characteristics of their social network graphs. I haven’t followed up on how valid any of that turned out to be.
There are rather a lot of people I share 20+ mutual friends with and have never seen or heard of. I look through ‘People You May Know’ all the time and see them. Though sometimes, the name seems vaguely familiar or I might have attended the same party once.
I think this is for a few specific reasons in my case:
A] I’m friends with a ton of childhood classmates on FB. I have moved halfway across the country and aged 12 years since I saw some of them (others I saw more recently while visiting), while they have stayed mostly in the Midwest and went to high school/college in our home town where they all got to know a bunch of people I never met.
B] When it comes to people in my current area; I didn’t go to college, which is how a lot of my FB friends around my age met a lot of their FB friends. A majority of the people from PA in their 20s I am FB friends went to Penn State, Temple, Arcadia or MontCo at some point, where they met the same people who I never saw.
C] I’m also friends with about 10 people who are active members of NA in my area, and that is a large and often close-knit community. But I’ve never been to a meeting so I’ve never met all the people they know from meetings.
There’s been a lot of overlap between group B and C in the last couple years, as all the druggies from high school starting trying to get sober in their mid-20s.
I don’t think this is a new thing, although it depends on how many people you know. But facebook does make it much easier to have a large ‘social circle’, and of course to see these connections.
I have a similar situation. I don’t have a separate Facebook “identity” for my personal life and my business (writing) life, and I’ve accepted friend requests from quite a few people I’ve only met because I signed books for them or they attended one of my seminars. Probably half of my Facebook friends are people I couldn’t pick out of a lineup.
I’m very new to FB and the very first day, the son of someone I knew was recc’d to me. I was sure I was descending (further) into insanity until I realized the son and I went to the same high school.
The h.s. had even moved locations, decades had passed, lifestyles changed drastically, etc. That’s the one and only connection besides knowing his parent. Since we all didn’t part on good company at all, I was sure bad things were afoot. I gotta grip (only 19.95!) and relaxed.
When the FB recommendations for friending are based on something like going to the same high school, in a smallish town no less, it’s bound to happen.
Happens to me all the time, plus the usual requests from people who are friends with half my relatives but whom I never heard from before. Since FB started allowing segregating people I add them to a restricted list.
Sometimes I see those “So and So is friends with 23 of your friends” notices and cannot for the life of me figure out why I don’t know them. I still don’t care to know them though.
Happens to me all the time. Shit, the worst is when, for whatever reason, you “friend” them and they apparently know all about you. This one girl in particular, whom I guess I went to HS with, was SO excited to “meet back up with me” “after all these years!”. But I had never laid eyes on this person before, I swear.
When I made a status update one day, looking for anyone with information about where I could get a T-shirt designed, this girl immediately (well, in a matter of about an hour) sends me a message, asking me what size do I wear? Because she’s at the t-shirt place right now and she’s having it made. :eek:
I thanked her but said that was too much, I wasn’t trying to get someone to make the shirt for me; I was only looking for info on the best place to get it done. But she would not take no for an answer; she “knew the guy” who owned the t-shirt place so it was no big deal. And honestly, the shirt was pretty well done. It exceeded my expectations.
So, I reluctantly accepted the gift and I asked her how she wanted to get it to me. “Oh, I can just mail it to you. What’s your address?” Uhhh, no. I told her how about we meet at a bookstore. I had a stalker vibe big time at this point. But we meet, and she was a very nice, albeit weird and sloppy and unkempt girl who did a very nice thing. She gave me the shirt and I thanked her and we chatted over coffee for a while before we parted ways.
After that, I think she thought we would begin “flirting” or something on FB. When I didn’t respond to her advances, she became very angry and petty and eventually “defriended” me. So, that stranger who was very familiar with me is no longer in my online life; but at least I got a pretty cool T-shirt out of it.
It happens a lot with school or or former work friends. Some friend of one of my fraternitiy brothers a year older or younger or someone who joined my old company after I left.
With me, it happens with either camp or high school friends. I am friends with a lot of my old counselors, (went for a month, so my counselors were basicly second mothers) so there are mutal friends who I have never heard of. Then there are some random high school friends. I thought I remembered everyone in high school but there are still people who pop up who are Who the Eff are you?"
I also get a lot of " You May Knows" from three people who are my second family
Has happened, but I usually don’t add them unless I personally know them (eventually) or recognize their name (as having met personally). If I do add them without personally knowing them, it’s after checking some of his/her stuff (replies to others, friends’ posts). If their restrictions are so tight I cannot see anything they post or reply, and I don’t know them, then I don’t add them.
It happens with my HS classmates, since many went to the same university and/or stayed in the island. So they moved almost as a group, and met people in college and around who ended up “joining the class”. Since I moved away right after HS, I never met them.
It also happens with my Brazilian circle, as all the ones I know stem from my initial visit in 2006 and subsequent ones. But they are all part of the same academic area, so they know even more faculty and students. And many who graduated still keep their ties by doing master’s, visiting their mentors, working in the labs, etc.
So the explanation (quite reasonable in many cases) that they must have friended a zillion random people, doesn’t hold true in my case.
