
Creating a friend recommendation algorithm from social network data - antgoldbloom
http://blog.echen.me/2012/07/31/edge-prediction-in-a-social-graph-my-solution-to-facebooks-user-recommendation-contest-on-kaggle/
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Zenst
The way people would navigate the suggestions, would in itself allow you to
match up like-minded people.

But there are two types of like-mindedness - the longterm common interest and
the shorterm.

By this I mean if you ask somebody to list there favourite numbers - say first
5 numbers and then matched those to other peoples choices, that would be in
general static choices and would give you some common grounds of a longterm
interest.

Now if you asked people to pick 5 random numbers - those that matched would be
people who have a short term comminality with those who matched up in that at
that point in time there intune and thinking the same.

A better example would be crowd mentality in that with the right set of
instances the crowd will share a interest and act as one were if they were all
isolated would they share the same reactions. That is the difference with a
short term say FOTM type comminality and long-term.

It's not easy and if it was then life would be very boring as everybody would
be very samish and they are not.

Also with every rule there is always an exception and the classic phrase
"opposites attact" does have some weight and also goes against any form of
pattern matching as it is not a hard and fast rule you can say just beacuse
they are the complete opposite they will get on.

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joe_the_user
This assumes that Facebook is something like a dating site, where people are
seeking others with a common interest.

But are people _seeking_ anyone on Facebook?

I would claim that Facebook is essentially the "end of point" of a friendship.
You are not going to become close to someone through Facebook, just avoid the
complete lack of contact that otherwise accompanies having met someone two
years ago - where short-term interests can still watch each other long-term.

If people aren't seeking new contact on Facebook, all the algorithms in the
world won't help them achieve it.

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itmag
_I would claim that Facebook is essentially the "end of point" of a
friendship._

What would the Facebook of starting-points look like? :)

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joe_the_user
Some combination of meetup.com, an events site and a dating site.

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joe_the_user
I think this is a problem Facebook only thinks it has. Or only thinks it can
solve. Or only thinks most people are trying to solve.

There's every indication the US is essentially saturated by Facebook. My in-
real-life friends who want to be on Facebook are already there. That's the
usual ~150 that I think studies show is max nearly everyone can maintain. I
also have a nearly equal number of purely Internet or Facebook or Professional
friends. I'm not inclined to have less but I get the strong feeling a good
portion of my friends want less, not more people to interact with online.

I wouldn't mind meeting new people. But I no reason to have more Facebook
friends.

Perhaps the only way Facebook can keep its momentum going is to sponsor
picnics and couples dancing across country. The only way to get aggregate more
Facebook connections between people would be for people to suddenly actually
have more "real life" friends.

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rouli
I don't believe Facebook set up this contest in order to find solutions to a
problem they have. The biggest clue is that the graph given to contenders was
a directed graph, unlike Facebook's social graph.

It seems very likely to me they used that problem in order to find good
candidates for their data-group, which is exactly what this contest was all
about. Either that, or they are trying to expand the social graph of Instagram
:)

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hythloday
I'm pretty sure that Facebook's social graph is directed since they introduced
the Subscribe To feature.

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sgt101
Given that the facebook graph is fairly mature I would think that this would
actually be against their best interests - surely a good friend recommender is
one of the things that a new entrant would need to break the market?

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obtu
You still need the graph to run the recommender. This algorithm would help new
users get up to speed quickly, with better results when the social graph is
large; it's just another network effect.

