As I wrote last week, Facebook has been adjusting the “friends you may know” feature over the past week. They took it down temporarily, brought it back up and now it has disappeared again. One of my readers sent me a screenshot of a new feature that Facebook has added: friend suggestion referrals. What happens is if you add a friend who is a new user, Facebook will prompt you to click through a list of friends that are probably friends with the person you have requested.

This is a great new feature and one that I’m sure new users will find extremely useful. One of the biggest challenges on Facebook is the loss of new users that are not able to connect immediately with other members. As such, Facebook is trying to engage these users as much as possible and connect them with people they may know. Since new users don’t have many contacts, the “friends you may know” feature does not work effectively since they don’t have a number of contacts to cross-check against.

This new feature emphasizes Facebook’s dedication to improving the ability to accurately map users’ social graph. The more effectively they can do this, the longer they will remain a leader in the social networking space. LinkedIn is currently the closest competitor when it comes to accurately mapping the graph. Thanks to Satish for the heads up!