

The Relationship Test - olugbam
http://dataclysm.org/relationshiptest

======
jjcm
I'm getting this response from facebook:

{ "error": { "message": "(#4) Application request limit reached", "type":
"OAuthException", "code": 4 } }

Looks like they've drilled facebook a bit too hard. Any chance Christian
Rudder will open source this so we can run with our own app tokens?

Shame - I was curious how this would compare to facebook's internal friend
ranking (discoverable through methods such as this:
[http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2013/11/10/script-shows-
faceb...](http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2013/11/10/script-shows-facebook-
ranks-friends/))

~~~
ampersandy
This is the (jsbeautified) source of the script from your article
([http://pastebin.com/kvvYXKKX](http://pastebin.com/kvvYXKKX)). I'll wager
grammar_costs is just a metric used by graph search and not your friends'
coefficients.

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tibbon
Hmm, I'm not entirely sure I understand the "assimilation score". My partner
Sarah is at the top, which makes sense, but then some people I barely know
(brother of an ex, etc) are like #3 and 4, even though we only have two mutual
friends. I have approximately 1,000 friends on FB... so maybe that's broken
something?

~~~
ericdykstra
Similar questions here, and I have much fewer Facebook friends (around 350).
My wife is #1, and it's not even close (66560 compared to #2, who is 8145).

But after that, I have a few people I don't care at all about in my top 10
(I'm thinking of just removing 3-4 of them now that I see that they're still
my friends), and a couple of my closest friends have a score of 1.

~~~
liuhenry
From the linked paper [1], it looks like the scores are calculated based on a
concept of "dispersion", which is how closely a particular individual in your
network is connected to each of the separate clusters of people you know.

Each of the clusters in the graph represents a "social foci", such as co-
workers, high school classmates, college classmates, etc.

The dispersion score calculates how well someone you know is connected to
these multiple disjoint clusters of people in your life, and tries to show
that the person with the highest score is most likely to be your romantic
partner.

This probably doesn't work so well in trying to identify friends, since it's
likely that a close friend from college may not know any of your friends from
work, or your high school classmates.

1 -
[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.6753v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.6753v1.pdf)

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lotharbot
From a quick skim of the algorithm paper, here's what I understand of how it
picks "high assimilation score" people:

1) look at all links to mutual friends; categorize friends based on their
connectedness to different clusters (ie, "school friends", "work friends",
etc.) 2) look for friends who are mutual friends with people from multiple
clusters (people who know both your family and your coworkers -- "bridge
friends") 3) look especially for friends who are friends with multiple people
from category 2 (people who know most of your bridge friends)

The assumption seems to be that people who are peripheral friends will only
know others from one circle. People who are somewhat close will know others
from multiple circles. And people who are the closest to you will know a lot
of your multi-circle friends.

(FWIW: this put my wife well ahead of anyone else, but the rest of the
ordering seems barely better than random. A guy I played video games with a
couple times back in 1998 is #2 by a large margin; the guy from the same video
game who my wife and I hang out with several times a week and who co-runs some
major projects with us scores less than 1/4 of that. My dad clocks in just
behind the new youth pastor at my church who I've known for all of two weeks.)

~~~
thret
'Inanimate carbon rod', a page that was a friend's joke and has never had any
posts, came 8th on my list.

~~~
__david__
Well, that's a Simpsons joke[1], so maybe it's popular because of that.

[1]
[http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Inanimate_carbon_rod](http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Inanimate_carbon_rod)

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megaman22
Hmm, I'd take it with a grain of salt, without knowing how the score is
calculated. All of my closest friends are ranked way, way down the listings.

I do see four distinct clumpings, with very little overlap: my large, extended
family, the people I went to high school with, people I knew in college, and
the small group of coworkers I have now. Which is kind of interesting, but
also makes total sense, since those are completely disjoint sets of people.

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wwweston
"it will show you ... which of your friends are most mathematically important
to your life."

Interesting use of the term "mathematically" to cover the likely difference
between the model and reality.

And the only purpose in participating, as far as I can tell, would be to
understand how close their model can come -- by definition, I almost certainly
know who my important relations are.

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pauleastlund
#1 is my wife, by literally an order of magnitude. That's about right; we have
a truly extraordinary relationship.

After that, unfortunately, this ranking is nonsense. #2 is someone I met once
and have never communicated with since. We have only one friend in common.
Totally bizarre. My good friends are scattered between ranks 5 and 50, amidst
a sea of near-strangers.

~~~
Xcelerate
> That's about right; we have a truly extraordinary relationship.

A relationship like this is what I want more than anything else in life, so I
hope you don't mind me derailing the conversation a little bit to ask: to what
do you credit with getting along so well? My parents also had an extraordinary
relationship (before my mother passed away), and I'm always interested in
figuring out what exactly it is that makes some couples so happy together.

~~~
pauleastlund
For us, it's that we're extremely close friends (we were friends for some time
before dating), we both have a tremendous respect for one another, we have the
same (fairly dark) sense of humor, and when we found each other we both knew
how lucky we were and both were willing to upend all of our previous
individual plans for life in order to be together.

None of that is a reproducible formula for a perfect relationship, and
honestly my personal track record wasn't great before finding my wife. Really
the only advice I have is to find someone that's not just a significant other
but a very close friend -- a lot of people say that, but not many truly have
it -- and, when you find someone like that, put her (or him) before absolutely
everything.

~~~
Xcelerate
Thank you for the advice! It means a lot.

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alexanderss
#1 is my ex, #2 and #3 are guys I barely know. After that, the top 10-20 are
just the Facebook friends that are most active on Facebook.

~~~
kafkaesque
That's interesting because #1 is my ex (who's not too active on Facebook), as
well. But #2 is my cousin who is hardly active on there. #3 is someone who is
kind of active but I never hung out with much.

My current girlfriend, who is not active on FB at all (she's more of a
lurker), is basically last, with only 1 assimilation point.

I only have a little over 100 friends, though.

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jacquesm
It's not much of a temptation for me because I don't have a fb account but
whenever I see facebook apps that promise to give you something in return I'm
always reminded of this:

[http://www.takethislollipop.com/](http://www.takethislollipop.com/)

~~~
harlanlewis
I don't want to take the lollipop, but I do want to know what happens when
someone else does. Share spoiler?

~~~
vitamen
To describe it would be to ruin it. Take the lollipop.

~~~
harlanlewis
That was what I expected in the most amazing way.

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diziet
My co-founder is rated more 'central' to my life than either than either one
of our's significant others.

It is quite good at grouping different sets of friends visually (ie, high
school friends, university friends, friends from different hobbies and sports,
work friends, etc).

------
Bahamut
Not sure if anyone else encountered this, but some of the data listed for
mutual friends is wrong. It often listed less mutual friends than I had in
common with many people, sometimes by 10+ people.

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sagnew
The person I have the highest assimilation score with is someone who I've
never talked to in my life, and I only accepted his friend request(really
recently) because we had a few mutual friends.

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crummy
Something strange: I revisited my results an hour later and the order seems to
be different. In some cases, a friend has gone from rank ~20 to 10.

My only guess is that people are adding/removing friends which changes things
around, but that seems to be quite a difference.

Edit: For what it's worth, the listing seems very accurate for the top 10,
which is comprised of my best friends, my sister, a couple old girlfriends.
Things get a little weaker after that.

~~~
bmh100
Rankings can seem to be unstable if the absolute differences between the
scores are very small relative to the likely ways those scores could change.

Example:

Rank,Score

1,0.81

2,0.541

3,0.540

..

40,0.538

Increasing the value of row 40 by just 1% will cause it to go from rank 40 to
rank 2.

Edit: Improved formatting.

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xkarga00
I kinda liked the graph (i suppose it's made up with Graphviz right?) because
it could sort out different groups of my friends eg. my first and second
Erasmus friends were two separate groups, friends back from my hometown were
another one, and another friends from a training course i had participated
lately. But the assimilation score list was totally off the point. The first
ten people i got are still friends but not that close to me.

------
jleader
It's interesting that this came along just a couple weeks after LinkedIn Labs
turned off InMaps (their visualization and clustering of your linkedin graph):
[http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4949/~/inma...](http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4949/~/inmaps
---no-longer-supported)

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silverpepsi
My 4 best friends in the world rank (well there are 5 but one quit Facebook):
1st, 6th, 13th, and 40th; 18th already begins in with people I kinda sorta
don't like or am at least ambivalent about.

Needless to say, it is a mess and doesn't support people who have lived in
different places all that well LOL.

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scottlocklin
A close friend got first place. Good show. Second place is someone I hardly
know: the post doc on my dissertation project's wife. I think I've met her IRL
twice. Second is worse than that. At the bottom are people I speak to on a
daily basis, or am biologically related to. Fail.

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totony
#1 is some guy i went to high school with which I never talked to that much...
weird, #2 is some guy I don't particularly like. My girlfriend is at ~30 and
my exes are in the top 20. I don't think that app is particularly revelent in
my case (most top 10 are people I barely know).

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spelunker
A lot of the "mutual friends" numbers are incorrect for my friends. Maybe a
permissions thing?

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thesimon
Throws an "Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token u" at line 224 (mutuals =
JSON.parse(arguments[i][0][j].body);)

Same for someone else? Waited quite a long time (comments here said it takes
long) and then opened the console.

~~~
kaeruct
same error here...

~~~
tjradcliffe
Runs forever on both Chrome and Firefox for me.

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pedalpete
WAY off for me. My top 10 include a good friends brother (whom I have very
little contact with), and two people I dislike somewhat strongly and have had
no contact with for at least 5 years.

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xutopia
The top spot makes sense for me but everything else makes no sense whatsoever.
How can someone I have only 2 friends in common with come in second?

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LordHumungous
My top ten contains five people who I barely know.

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jpea
My wife is #1 on the list, then just curiously, I scrolled to the bottom. The
last 3 spots are populated by ex's.

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bussiere
It bugs when you have more than 1000 friends the scripts takes too long and
freeze the browser ....

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karcass
Nothing useful for me. Way off.

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wuliwong
Can anyone give a basic description of the assimilation score?

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CSDude
Nice, but the UI lags too much for me. I have ~200 friends.

~~~
s4sharpie
Agreed - if ever there was an example of why performance matters on a web app.
I gave up after the spinner was still spinning after I had navigated away and
back (and replied to 5 emails)

