Facebook Adds People You Know
Posted by Nick O'Neill on March 27th, 2008 10:43 AM
Earlier this year I reported that Facebook would be adding a friend recommendation tool to the site. Just yesterday they turned on the feature and today I was finally able to view a list of friends that I may be connected to. This is similar to LinkedIn which also began offering the feature recently. As you can view on the left, Facebook displays a couple of individuals that you may be connected to from your homepage and then a complete list on find friends page.
This is one of the tools which we will see become a standard on all sites that are trying to become a center of your social graph. In a world where having 1,000 contacts is no longer a foreign concept, having automated systems for helping us to connect will become increasingly important. This tool illustrates how Facebook is leading the way in becoming a central management system of all of your contacts.
For those not on Facebook, joining is going to become increasingly important. I would also suggest that soon enough, managing granular privacy settings will become a standard practice across all social sites. While it may be initially complex, it is the kind of control that all individuals have a right to when surfing the social web. Have you benefited from this new friend suggestion tool?
March 27th, 2008 at 11:31 am
i have the strange feeling that I saw this “people you may know” box on my FB home 1 or 2 months ago… but not sure.
Anyway, good move from FB, searching friends that you see everyday pages was a time waste to me…
March 27th, 2008 at 11:57 am
I still cannot see this features.
March 27th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Yep, this has never appeared on my home page (and still doesn’t), but it’s been accessible from the “Friend Finder” page for some time now.
March 27th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Nick, I think the next step from this will be Facebook Introductions, putting them truly head-to-head against LI: http://www.emaildashboard.com/2008/03/facebook-introd.html
March 27th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
They should add a setting to disable suggestions from acquaintances or those that have their 100+ college friends in their list.
March 28th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
[…] I wrote about how Facebook has begun suggesting your friends. One additional feature of this new system is […]