Every time I log on to Facebook, the friend suggestion box looms large in the top right corner of the page, prompting me to look at it out of curiosity. Interestingly, the recommendations seem to change quite a bit, especially as of late, which makes me wonder how it works. The Facebook website does say something about using information from your profile, but it’s a bit nebulous.
For most of the time since its introduction, the suggestion feature did what it was supposed to: recommend me people that I knew that I wasn’t Facebook friends with. The suggestion feature occasionally listed someone I knew well, but usually listed people I knew of but was not good friends with. Most suggestions were pretty understandable: people I had a few classes with or people that were track/cross country team members after I had exhausted my eligibility. A few people in the computer science department were thrown in there as well. For awhile it also recommended family members way out on some distant fork of my family tree.
Suddenly, within the past week or two, the friend suggestions have become very weird. Now I don’t even recognize the names of the people it suggests. Currently, the suggestions feature recommends 27 items: 2 groups and 25 people. Of the 25 people:
- I know 0 (again, I don’t even recognize any of the names)
- 1 is male; the other 24 are female (do I not have enough female friends?)
- 13 have a hometown or current city in Virginia
- 2 have Virginia Beach listed as their hometown or current city
- 1 is on a collegiate sports team
- 23 have an affiliation with William and Mary
- 19 are undergraduates at William and Mary
- 12 have friends in common
Obviously, the intent is to try to match me with other people with the same geographic location, school, and interests/activities, but it isn’t working. The school and geographic regions may be appropriate, but it isn’t enough. The gender and undergraduate distributions are a bit odd, and only half have any friends in common. I know there are plenty of better matches than the ones currently suggested to me, as evidenced by the suggestions made over the past months. I do remember that a week or so ago, my profile suddenly changed after some kind of update with the way interests, work, and school items are handled. The recommendation changes may have something to do with that update if some of those items are no longer considered in the suggestions algorithm.
My guess is that Facebook uses something like k-NN or Bayesian classification to figure out the friend/group/fan page suggestions. Given a common set of feature vectors for each profile, Facebook may determine the k closest matches, where k=27 in this case. It may even use the profile features of my current friends to figure out potential friends. Nevertheless, it seems their algorithm needs improvement.
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