Facebook Begins Suggesting Friends?
Posted by Nick O'Neill on February 5th, 2008 5:55 PMOne of my readers just sent me an email about a new feature that he hadn’t seen previously. I haven’t seen this feature either. Apparently there is now a feature that “Suggests a friend to me.” I’m assuming that if there is a contact that you have a certain number of shared friends with it will automatically send you an email notification telling you about that person and suggesting that you contact them.
This is an interesting feature that I previously hadn’t seen. I have been on other social networks such as Last.fm that tell you who your “neighbors” are. On Last.fm your neighbors are people that you have similar listening tastes to. On other sites it’s based on the number of friends you have in common with someone. This is a simple little addition to the Facebook platform but it is definitely a useful one. I will be interested to see if I start getting a number of new friend suggestions.
I could see this being extremely useful on LinkedIn. Do you think this new feature is useful?
February 5th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
brilliant
February 5th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Not only do I think this is useful, I wanted to create a Facebook
application to do exactly that. I was going to call it, “Why aren’t we
friends?” Unfortunately, you can’t get your friends’ friends list
through the Facebook Platform, so I was unable to create the app.
How does one get to this feature? I don’t recognize where on the site
the screenshot originates. Are you sure it’s real?
February 5th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
This is very useful. People discovery is a killer feature of social media and this functionality adds power to that.
February 5th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
[…] always interesting Unofficial Facebook Blog is running a story that Facebook is (or may be soon) starting to suggest new people that you […]
February 5th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
@Dan, this is the Account preferences page for Email Notifications from Facebook and Facebook applications.
February 5th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Answer for Dan Jones - It is real. You can find the feature shown in the screenshot by clicking account, then under the notifications tab.
February 5th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
This can be found in the notifications page: http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications
However, it’s listed under “notify me when someone…” So it appears that Facebook will be adding a feature to let you suggest people to your current friends - not Facebook making automatic suggestions.
February 5th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
linkedin has done this for a long time
February 5th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
I think you’re reading this wrong… it’s not an automated friend generator feature (like LinkedIn has). Rather this is just a toggle for turning on/off email notification if someone SUGGESTS you should be a friend with someone else.
February 6th, 2008 at 12:24 am
I have this on my account, I want to see what Facebook suggests up.
February 6th, 2008 at 12:25 am
I’m the one that originally emailed Nick, and I was thinking it could be more like what Joey described. Kind of like when you click “Forward to friend” on Myspace.
February 6th, 2008 at 3:22 am
“However, it’s listed under “notify me when someone…” So it appears that Facebook will be adding a feature to let you suggest people to your current friends - not Facebook making automatic suggestions.”
AGREED!
February 6th, 2008 at 3:27 am
As sheep hints at above, LinkedIn has a feature called “People You May Know” which launched almost a year ago. It is one of our most popular features.
February 6th, 2008 at 4:48 am
I found your comment about LinkedIn a bit surprising. The “People You May Know” application, which uses sophisticated analytics to suggest connections, has been available on LinkedIn since early last year.
- Adam
February 6th, 2008 at 5:41 am
Sounds like th Amazon feature of people who bought this book also bought this book. I guess its gonna be something like people who connected with xxx…. also connected with yyy….
February 6th, 2008 at 9:06 am
This is interesting.
But it quite clear that it is not Facebook making the suggestion, it is your friends making a suggestion.
Information about this (new?) feature can be found in help under “Friends and Social Timeline” under “How do I suggest a friend to someone?”
“After you confirm a friend request from a new user, you can suggest to your friends that they also send a friend request to the user. Clicking “Suggest friends that [Name] may know” will bring up a window of all of your confirmed friends. You can use the search bar to find a particular person, filter all of your friends by network or simply scroll through your complete friends list. Clicking a friend’s picture will add them to the “Selected” tab. Once you’ve made all of your selections, click “Send Suggestions” to send a suggestion to each user that they add the new user as a friend. The suggestions will appear on your friends’ home pages, and will allow them to quickly send a friend request to the new user.
Please take note that you currently cannot suggest friends for users who have been on Facebook for some time.”
February 6th, 2008 at 10:44 am
I’m surprised no one has seen it in action; it seems geared toward new users when they add you. I’ve used it for my less-social-app-literate friends who might not already know to comb through friend lists to see who else you both know is on there.
February 6th, 2008 at 11:49 am
This is definitely interesting, even if probably an “obvious step”. As others have said LinkedIn has a similar feature, if not more sophisticated, as it works withouth having to have a “friendly middle person”.
While on UnLtdWorld, an online platform for social entrepreneurs, we have an application called “neighbourhoods” which leverages on meta-data to suggest connections dynamically, so again going beyond circles of acquaitances.
February 7th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
hmm, so if someone says they are interested in the opposite sex, will they deliver those results, becoming the next generation dating site? (just curious)
March 19th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
a classmate of mine just joined and he has a “Suggest Friends for …”
I think this feature is pretty cool - how do I enable this for my other contacts?
Given I can’t see my own profile as it looks for others - do I need to do anything to enable this feature on my own profile so people can suggest friends to me?
March 27th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Well facebook does this thru the ‘find friends’ menu - it is called ‘People you may know’ and is based on your existing connections
March 27th, 2008 at 10:43 am
[…] this year I reported that Facebook would be adding a friend recommendation tool to the site. Just yesterday they turned […]
March 27th, 2008 at 11:04 am
Wow, this is great! No more digging through yearbooks to find old classmates!
Totally a plus on the social media aspect, and yes - this would be great on LinkedIn. Expect them to deploy something like this in the next 2 months, for sure.