Facebook Guru? Explain this...

[Vectis]

OK so I'm not a Facebook expert by any stretch of the imagination. I have an account in my name and a group VectisVibe Events which I must admit I have done very little with other than upload a couple of (non-annotated) photos and agree to a bunch of friend requests. I am the only member.

Anyway, I'm on there last night having received a friend request from an old colleague, and in the 'Suggestions' bit I have a whole bunch of people for whom I have done wedding discos in the past few years!

These aren't people who have requested me as a friend, they're just seemingly random peeps with one thing in common. They are scattered amongst a bunch of folks I've never heard of, mind.

So this got me thinking about how FB decided to include these people in my suggestions. At first I thought FB could have crawled my website, but a couple of the names are very common (ie John Smith) yet only the specific John is present in the list, so I discounted that.

Then I wondered if these people had been discussing me in some way, using FB as the medium - but a global search for regular terms throws up a blank.

I haven't sent a friend request to any of these people as I expect it would appear out of the blue - and they'd be wondering who the hell Martin X was!

So... any brighter-than-me-on-all-things-facebook folks want to proffer a suggestion or two?

[rob1963]

I think I can answer this for you.

Whenever someone adds someone as a friend on facebook, it gives them the option to suggest other people to add (from their existing friends list) that the person being added might also know & might therefore want to add.

Therefore, when that person logs into Facebook, they will see a list of people that they might know & might want to add to their own friends list, although in most cases they won't actually know the people concerned.

I think I could have explained this better, but hopefully you get the idea!

[Vectis]

Hmmm.... not so sure.

In my Home Page, top right I have 'Suggestions'.

When I open this, apart from the odd silly 'join this group because your friend X has' I see a list of 27 people with pictures.

Of this 27, half a dozen I know to be friends of friends - I recognise the names but I don't know them well enough to add them as friends of my own.

Of the remaining 21, FIVE are people or couples I've done wedding discos for in the past couple of years.

The remaining 16 I've never heard of.


Focusing on the 5 wedding people, only 1 is from the Isle of Wight. The other 4 are from (if memory serves me correctly) Dorset, Brighton, London and Nottingham.

I can't believe that I'm only two degrees of separation from these people?!?

[rob1963]

I think my previous post was correct.

Those suggestions which you see for people to add are nothing to do with facebook automatically crawling your website, but are suggestions made when other people are adding each other as friends, and they are listing you as someone they might also know & want to add.

When you add a friend to facebook, something comes up saying something along the lines of "suggest other people this person may know"

You can then add people from your existing facebook friends list that you think the new person you're adding may also know, and these people will appear when they next log into facebook & look at the friend suggestions.

I get loads of these new friends suggestions on facebook, but as far as I know I've never even heard of at least 90% of them!

[[email protected]]

it may have something to do with email addresses in address books, as you can upload your whole address book in to it and then select who you want to send it to, maybe facebook keeps a track of this and is able to formulate the suggestions from there.

I set a page up for work from scratch and after the initial friend requests from people that have sent invites to my email address, i was amazed at how many people it was suggesting to me that we had on our database.

That's the only way i can think of that they do it.

[rob1963]

Further to my previous post, I've just looked at the friends suggestions on my own facebook page.

There were 60 suggestions there, and I knew 2 of them.

Enough said!

[[email protected]]

Got it.

Found this answer to the question on their help pages......

Alright, so I've been digging, and finally found a way to request an answer. (It took a while!) I also contacted the people that ensure the privacy of facebook, and asked them, so a complaint was filed with them regarding this. The answer I received, is although I haven't given them access to my email contacts in my private email address, the two individuals who have appeared in my "people you may know" have given facebook authorization to access their email contacts. So since I"m there, they link us. I hope this helps y'all understand how that might work!

I guessed correctly , Do i get a gold star?

[rob1963]

I guessed correctly , Do i get a gold star?

Yes.

The information I gave was also correct, so I'll also have one please!

[Vectis]

Do i get a gold star?

I'll also have one please!

Here you go chaps - that makes perfect sense.

Share them nicely....

[rob1963]

Here you go chaps - that makes perfect sense.

Share them nicely....

Whoaaaa...thanks Vectis!