Facebook Now Suggests “People You May Know”

Facebook has introduced a cool new feature, which suggests "people you may know" based on your existing friends (mutual friends).

people_you_may_know

You can find this new feature under Facebook’s Friend Finder section. I knew 17 out 27 people listed by Facebook as possible friends. I consider that’s to be reasonable accurate! LinkedIn has a similar feature too, but in my personal opinion, it’s not as accurate as Facebook’s feature. I don’t have of a lot connections on LinkedIn, maybe that’s why it turned out be less accurate than Facebook. Chime in and post your comparison through comments.

This post was published by on March 27, 2008

About the Author: Thilak Rao works as a Social Media Expert. He is one of the first professional bloggers from India, and he loves to write, travel and click photos. Follow him on Twitter @thilak

  • http://green-flamingo.com Nathaniel

    Wow! I am really surprised at how they find possible friends. How do they do that?

  • http://tech-buzz.net Thilak

    Nathaniel: I’m mathematically not that complicated at all. Facebook just looks for you and someone who shares common friends with you. Got it?

  • http://prosperitywriter.com/ Prosperity Writer

    is this legal? i mean showing your profile to people you don’t know or did not request for it. how about privacy issues?

  • http://retodon8.net/ Retodon8

    17 out of 27 people is accurate? I suppose that simply means you didn’t know those 17 people had a Facebook account. If you you had them added already, they wouldn’t show up in the list. The other 10 still would’ve, and maybe some other-yet people would be there too. In other words, this feature’s accuracy is also dependent on how aggressively you’ve been searching (and adding) people manually. :)

  • http://retodon8.net/ Retodon8

    @Prosperity Writer, similar-ish websites have had this feature for a long time now (although usually simply called “Friends of friends”, not suggesting you may also know those FoFs), and those websites usually offer the option to not let yourself show up on those lists.
    Facebook will probably do the same.

  • http://www.exposedseo.com Dr SEO

    I thought facebook was there to make it easier for you to keep in touch with your friends. No i get friend requests from random people and i can’t accept them because my profile contains personal info i only disclose to my real life friends and family.

  • http://theofftopic.com/ The Off Topic

    I’ve known about 80% of the ones listed on my ‘People you know”

    They coded it well (prolly mutual friends of friends + maybe location)

  • http://abhisays.com Abhishek Kumar

    Facebook is regularly coming with new features to attract new users and keep existing user entact. No doubt, in near future it will defeat myspace and become no. 1 social networking website.

  • http://chat.qlbe.com chat

    i mean showing your profile to people you don’t know or did not request for it. how about privacy issues?