I'm getting this response from facebook:<p>{
"error": {
"message": "(#4) Application request limit reached",
"type": "OAuthException",
"code": 4
}
}<p>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?<p>Shame - I was curious how this would compare to facebook's internal friend ranking (discoverable through methods such as this: <a href="http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2013/11/10/script-shows-facebook-ranks-friends/" rel="nofollow">http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2013/11/10/script-shows-faceb...</a>)
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?
From a quick skim of the algorithm paper, here's what I understand of how it picks "high assimilation score" people:<p>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)<p>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.<p>(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.)
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.<p>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.
"it will show you ... which of your friends are most mathematically important to your life."<p>Interesting use of the term "mathematically" to cover the likely difference between the model and reality.<p>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.
#1 is my wife, by literally an order of magnitude. That's about right; we have a truly extraordinary relationship.<p>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.
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:<p><a href="http://www.takethislollipop.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.takethislollipop.com/</a>
My co-founder is rated more 'central' to my life than either than either one of our's significant others.<p>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).
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.
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.
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.<p>My only guess is that people are adding/removing friends which changes things around, but that seems to be quite a difference.<p>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.
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.
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): <a href="http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4949/~/inmaps---no-longer-supported" rel="nofollow">http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4949/~/inma...</a>
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.<p>Needless to say, it is a mess and doesn't support people who have lived in different places all that well LOL.
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.
#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).
Throws an "Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token u" at line 224 (mutuals = JSON.parse(arguments[i][0][j].body);)<p>Same for someone else? Waited quite a long time (comments here said it takes long) and then opened the console.
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.