4 ms·
Doubtful. Facebook has mechanisms for defining both familial and romantic relationships, as well as usage data in the form of profile visits and wall comments
by gyardley 16y ago
Doubtful.
Facebook has mechanisms for defining both familial and romantic relationships, as well as usage data in the form of profile visits and wall comments and likes.
It might be a little more work, but I'm sure they can take a large friend list and still figure out who's family, who's a close mutual friend, who's disproportionately interested in who, and who's a fake friend just there for the purposes of social gaming.
Even better, since this true social graph depends largely on usage data, it's available to Facebook but not to scrapers.
- motters 16y agoIs it just me that finds this creepy?
- DLWormwood 16y agoNope. I avoided FB for a long time because of this, before family and career roped me into signing up for dummy accounts about a month ago.
- exit 16y agowhat's a dummy account? pseudonym? same name / two accounts?
- derefr 16y agoI would imagine that it's an account that has nothing interesting happening on it, but is just there so people can point to it. (Referencing the term "dummied out" — http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DummiedOut http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DummiedOut)
- patrickyeon 16y agoNope, but realize: they have exactly whatever you (and people who talk about you) have given it. I'm constantly amazed that people are surprised to discover that "Facebook knows all these things about me!"
- jerf 16y agoI'm not sure you'd necessarily get the answer you think you'd get, or the quality you're expecting when you think about it. Do you continuously visit all your actual friends walls, or just wait for the feed to stream in, with Facebook unable to tell whether your eyes jump over it or actually read it? Are there "game" friends that you pay more attention to than, say, your uncle? Plus a lot of the immediate answers you might think of if you don't know the shape of the social graph won't work. You can't just look for "distant" friends (i.e., break the friend link and measure the new friending distance), because even before Facebook it was "well known" that six links can get you anywhere in the world; Facebook must be large enough by now that they are subject to the same principle. I would not leap to the conclusion that they actually can tell. The data is noisy and ambiguous, the graph's shape is amorphous and relatively homogeneous (everybody's pretty much the same basic distance from everybody else, Distance(RandomPerson1, RandomPerson2) will have surprisingly small variance), it's a hard problem. Possible not solvable even in theory, even if you could precisely nail down what exactly it is you were looking for.
- thwarted 16y agoFacebook has mechanisms for defining both familial and romantic relationships Facebook has a mechanism for defining a romantic relationship.