Like Secret Finds Romance Within Your Social Circle

Not the first Facebook app to do this. For example (link now deleted, though), <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2334990" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2334990</a>, which I remember because I posted this comment:<p>"Oh, I just marked you/everyone to see if you had marked me, I wasn't being serious."

In college, my friend coded an official "somebody likes you" webapp for the senior formal.<p>I had the email addresses for 1/2 the senior class (through an email that wasn't BCC'ed), so I wrote a program to war-dial his webapp.<p>I found out that, of the "somebody likes you" messages I got, three of them were guys who entered all their guys friends, to make sure they weren't being messed with. (And inadvertently messing with their friends in the process.) The other message to me was from a person I didn't want to date, and had to politely decline.<p>A few friends caught wind of this technology, so I ran the program for them too. Results were similar. I don't think there were any true romantic matches made.<p>My friend who coded this app never fails to tell this story when he recommends me to investors, with the best intentions. I hope it reads as YC-style creative rule-bending.

It's cute, and I could see where it could really help some people out, but overall I think people just need to take more responsibility for demonstrating their romantic interest. Even if it doesn't work out, I think it's healthy to air these things out.

Over the years I've had a lot of spam mails from services that claimed to be doing this (but obviously weren't). If I'd gotten a message from this one, I'd probably discard it as spam (or a friend trolling).

I believe rather than focusing on people in your friends circle, it would be a better idea to focus on friends of your friends. Say an app that listed the photo and short bio of all of your friend's friends. You could then express an interest in somebody you would like to date and the app would notify your mutual friend and that friend would make an introduction.<p>Ofcourse there are certain issues with this approach too like the mutual friend being someone you 'kindof sortof' know, or a mutual friend who happens to be an ex of yours.

I think it would be cooler if this could be done programmatically.<p>Write a matchmaker system/app? that users could allow to process their data and find patterns (likes, comments) tying them to people they were interested in. This could then anonymously contact the matched individual and prompt them to run the app.<p>This would avoid some abuse issues and because each partner has no control over the matches made, makes the whole thing less awkward.<p>Might also include: - Textual analysis of comment text throughout a users 'graph'. - Privacy issues. - Business plan.

1. Post link on Facebook redirected through your web server. 2. Correlate ip/site coming from with individual.<p>Now you have stats on who is stalking/interested in you. (Disclaimer: I don't use Facebook)

Isn't it possible to simply "like" all your friends, and then sit back and wait for the notifications to come in about all the people that like you?

Hasn't this already been invented? Like several times?

Is there any evidence that this problem really exists? In my experience, it's only in the movies.