{"id":494,"date":"2009-05-26T11:15:40","date_gmt":"2009-05-26T16:15:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/?p=494"},"modified":"2009-05-26T11:15:40","modified_gmt":"2009-05-26T16:15:40","slug":"facebook-friend-weirdness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/facebook-friend-weirdness.html","title":{"rendered":"Facebook friend weirdness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, I like Facebook.  One of the things I do occasionally is look at the &#8220;Friend suggestions&#8221; of people that I might know.  For the most part, they are either:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>People I know but don&#8217;t want to be friends with (old mission or high school people I barely knew then)\n<li>Stupid things like &#8220;Laughter&#8221; or &#8220;Campfires&#8221; or &#8220;Subway&#8221;\n<li>Local teenagers that are friends with the teenagers in my ward that I am friends with\n<li>Other people that I do not know\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s kind of an interesting dynamic &#8211; how to best populate these suggestions.  It stands to reason that people that people that share a whole lot of mutual friends with me might also be my friends.  For example, one friend I recently added was my cousin Jared.  He had 15 mutual friends with me, so Facebook assumed (correctly) that I might also know him.  Where it falls short is say this one guy from my mission.  We share 7 mutual friends and Facebook is at least correct that I know who he is, but I didn&#8217;t really know him very well.<\/p>\n<p>But what I find interesting are the people that show up that have completely random sets of mutual friends with me.  I&#8217;m reminded of a situation a few years ago where we found out through a forwarded email chain or something that my cousin&#8217;s wife Candace was good friends with the sister of a family (the Wickmans) that lived in our ward here in Cincinnati.<\/p>\n<p>I guess this kind of the whole point of things like Six Degrees of Separation and LinkedIn and such &#8211; that we are for the most part clusters of people, with occasional longer &#8220;branches&#8221; out to other groups of clusters.<\/p>\n<p>So, here are a few examples.  Note that I do not personally know any of these people (to my knowledge) but Facebook suggests them as my friends because I have several mutual friends with them.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Brian Hanna, who is friends with the Brookses, a couple from my ward, but also friends (and I think related?) to my cousin Sarah and my cousin-in-law Candace\n<li>Rachel Martel, who is friends with a guy from my church (Reed) and my cousin Sarah\n<li>There were a couple of other ones that I noticed but did not write down &#8211; but similar things where it was just weird that this person knew 2 (or more) people that I also knew, but from completely different circles\n<\/ul>\n<p>Anyway, just thought I&#8217;d share&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, I like Facebook. One of the things I do occasionally is look at the &#8220;Friend suggestions&#8221; of people that I might know. For the most part, they are either: People I know but don&#8217;t want to be friends with (old mission or high school people I barely knew then) Stupid things like &#8220;Laughter&#8221; or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[152,58],"tags":[307,296],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":495,"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions\/495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.regoarrarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}