You wake up one morning, check your
device and boom there is a new friend suggestion by Facebook. You recall that
you haven't been in sync with that person and that you have met that person
really really long ago. No communication had occurred between you two since
then. So how did Facebook suggested you this guy?
Well the most obvious thing that will
come to your mind that how this person is suggested is that Facebook must have
gone through the list of mutual friends and connected the dots. That's correct but
there is much more. Let's see what all things Facebook digs about you to
suggest you a new friend.
There are tons of services that Facebook
provides including groups, events, searching for others, photo sharing and the
list goes on. And yes Facebook uses almost all of these services to get to know
about your network.
Let's see them one by one:
1. People you search and who search
you: When you search for someone, even when
you clear your search history afterwards, Facebook records your search and gets
an idea that you are trying to connect to that person meaning you must have
known him/her somehow. The other way around also works in similar manner.
2. Mutual Friends: This has been this
earlier, this is the most basic feature Facebook uses to recommend new friend. It’s
like the transitive property as in if A is friend of B, B is a friend of C then
most likely A must have known C. One thing that is considered is the number of
mutual friends, larger the number of mutual friends more likely the two persons
know each other.
3. Common Groups, Events: Common Groups and events are more likely to have people
that have some kind of familiarity with each other either formally or
informally. So this record is also taken into account.
These were some of the earlier features
that Facebook used to suggest new friends, but with the advent of mobile
systems i.e., smartphones Facebook has now got much more options to suggest you
new friends:
4. Tagging: Just like the mutual friend feature,
photo tagging is another clue that you know someone. With the advent of
computer vision and machine learning, Facebook's photo tagging provide much
more accurate friend suggestion.
5. Location: Yes you read it right! Recently Facebook used
device location to predict that two people can know each other. For e.g.,
people working at same institute, office. But later this was found to be
inappropriate as this feature was not correct for most of the cases.
6. Contacts: If you share your contacts with Facebook
or Facebook messenger, they will use this information for recommending new
friends. Facebook cleverly uses timestamp of the contact created to recommend
friends. Hence a contact that is added recently would be more likely to get
suggested than a contact that has been in your contact list since many years.
Some of the Latest Features that are
in process of addition to the existing algorithm:
7. Wi-Fi-Connectivity: Yes, a recent patent by
Facebook has revealed that it will be using mutual network to suggest new
friends. So if you are in Wi-Fi network and some other person is also in the
same network that you have never encountered before, chances are that you will
most likely to see that face on your Facebook's friend suggestion page.
Several more filters will be used by
this feature to prevent flooding your suggestion page, such as the # of times
you have encountered each other, the time, etc.
Features that are not included
to suggest new friends:
1. Emails: There is a misconception that along
with contacts Facebook must have also used email to suggest new friends but
that is not possible since Facebook cannot access your emails directly as of
now.
2. Text Messages: Technically Facebook can
access the text messages on Android, but still Facebook does not use this thing
as of now.
3. Web Activity: Your web activity can
easily be tracked by using cookies but Facebook doesn't trust third party
websites and apps so this idea has been dropped by Facebook.
So now you must have got an idea, what all things Facebook use and how
it utilizes your activities to suggest you new friends and help you
connect with more people!!
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