People You May Know (Or Not)

"Add this person, you have 17 mutual friends!" Facebook tells me. But is that really a lot? I mean, 17 friends in common is only about 5% of my 300+ Facebook friends, and an even smaller percentage of her 600+ friends. Facebook recommends I add a lot of people I've never even met just because we have more than two mutual friends. And half the friend requests I get nowadays are from people I'm not eve sure I know--I have little doubt it's because people flip through their recommendations and add anyone with a seemingly large amount of common friends.

Facebook could curb such confusing instances if it based those friend recommendations on percentage of mutual friends, not just the number itself. For instance, it makes sense to recommend someone who shares 47% of your friend list, doesn't it? That could be hundreds of users, depending on your activity on the site. But what about someone who shares 47 of the 1028 friends on your list? That isn't even 5% common friends. What's even the point of saying you might know each other? Why doesn't Facebook skip the recommendation and find someone with higher percentage chance of you knowing them?

Of course, the percentage system isn't perfect. What may be only a handful of friends on your list could very well be half of someone else's. That's really the biggest problem with basing recommendations off of percentage of mutual friends: users with hundreds of friends could possibly see fewer recommendations than those who are new to the site or those who are stingy with the Add Friend button. And the likelihood of users finding it harder to expand their friend list after it grows beyond a certain point poses a great threat to a site that feeds off user connectivity as voraciously as Facebook does.

I suppose that's why Facebook bases friend recommendations on number of friends in common, though. =/