Something has gone haywire in Facebook’s friend networks algorithm in the past day or so. Yesterday I received an email from a reader who said his networks were reporting things inaccurately. Today, Caroline McCarthy posted something on her tumblog about having way too many friends at Harvard. Lo and behold the same thing was going crazy on my profile.
My profile claims that I have 597 friends at Harvard and then once I click on the link it said I had 702 friends at Harvard, listing a bunch of people that never attended the university. So what’s gone wrong exactly with Facebook’s system? We have no idea but sorting by networks clearly doesn’t work anymore. Why is it reporting that so many people go to Harvard?
I have no idea but I can guess that it may have to do something with Harvard being one of the default networks early on. Since it has been a relatively slow Friday, I decided that I would go ahead and record a screencast of the network calculations going crazy. You can view the video below. Let us know if you’ve been having similar problems.
Mine says that I have 87 friends from Rutgers and George Mason. I really only have two from those networks.
Comment by Livy — February 13, 2009 @ 3:37 pm
My account is doing this too, although the inaccurate network is Orlando, FL, instead, saying I have 65 friends in that network when, in reality, I only have a few from FL.
Comment by Marcus Schmidt — February 13, 2009 @ 3:28 pm
Mine says I have a bunch of friends in NYC & DC that I don't actually have. How weird!
Comment by Emily — February 13, 2009 @ 5:49 pm
i hav none.
Comment by Zafarali Ahmed — February 18, 2009 @ 1:11 am