The algorithms that run under the hood at facebook are pretty sophisticated. Facebook is able to interpret my social graph interactions and friends of friends connections to make effective recommendations for people that I might know (or should know).

For the socially shy or people that are new to facebook this feature is pretty cool. Facebook recommends “people that I may know”. This makes it easy for people to make connections. I have found that the recommendations that it makes are fairly decent. It has actually recommended people that I know from the real world and helped to connect us on facebook. This is a very valuable insight that facebook brings to the surface and helps people to connect.

It also works fairly well for people that have been on facebook for a while and have quite a few friends. I wish that facebook would allow me to set parameters (such as keywords) so that they could recommend people with similar interests (Business, Technology, Design, Branding, Marketing, etc.). I suspect that this feature is coming.

I like to draw the Amazon recommendation analogy: people who liked this book also liked this book. Facebook has just applied it to relationships: “people that your friends know and that you might like to know”. With the facebook friend recommendation engine gaining traction; is dating far behind?

You can see the expanded view of facebook friend recommendations for your self here.

Facebook Friend Recommendations

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