Creating a friend recommendation algorithm from social network data

The way people would navigate the suggestions, would in itself allow you to match up like-minded people.<p>But there are two types of like-mindedness - the longterm common interest and the shorterm.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It's not easy and if it was then life would be very boring as everybody would be very samish and they are not.<p>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.

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

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?