Comments on: Just what does “Facebook” think we are all doing, anyway?

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:33:03 +0000

uqbar, that makes no sense! I was actively engaged in assembling an even better list of names of people who would have very similar habits to mine: Africanists interested in the Pliocene and late Miocene with a proclivity for rodents! They don’t know what they are missing!!!

By: Dominic

Dominic — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 12:23:20 +0000

Well said Uqbar, there’s also the problem of facebook actually interfering with the wider web as described on Anil Dash’s blog.

dashes.com/anil/2011/11/facebook-is-gaslighting-the-web.html

dashes.com/anil/2011/11/gaslighting-the-response.html

By: uqbar

uqbar — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 18:05:15 +0000

This makes perfect sense if you understand that for Facebook, you are not the customer, you are the product. The real customers of Facebook are advertisers, of course.

From this perspective, it doesn’t matter if your “friends” are really people you know (or even want to know) – what does matter is that they share common interests and can be packaged and sold (along with you) with related data (birthdays, income level, where you live, what you like, and much, much more).

By: Sam N

Sam N — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:23:39 +0000

Seems silly, unless you have a rejection rate of below 75% or something (possible if you send a lot of requests) I would think facebook would leave someone with a fairly long leash in making friend requests, as they’re probably not spam. Or maybe I’m naive about how people are using facebook.

By: Dorid

Dorid — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:17:35 +0000

This is a recent development on FB, and they are trying to cut down on spammers randomly adding large numbers of friends. I know it’s stupid. They keep popping suggestions up at you, and if you follow them, FB assumes you’re just collecting people. There seems to be a threshold of somewhere around 5 or 6 adds at a time before they shut you down.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:33:49 +0000

Good point. Actually, not so much because they are real world but because they are new to the community. They don’t fit either real world friends (thy are not physically close to me) nor the facebook extended community profiles.

By: Camels With Hammers

Camels With Hammers — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:24:30 +0000

Maybe since most of your fb friends are non-real world friends you have their algorithms messed up. They now expect the sorts of people you know to be ones of certain kinds (those who have the same mutual friends already and who certain sets of commonalities, etc.) and they think you’re now going through a random person’s list and friending random people with little in common with you.