A Bizarre Facebook Mystery
A while back, Facebook introduced this “Suggested Friends” feature wherein it would skim your friends list and their friends and lists of people who went to the same school as you, etc., and would post people on your homepage, encouraging you to friend them based on your common past or amount of mutual friends. I’ve actually taken up a couple of these opportunities, and recognize lots of people it suggests, though I ignore many of them (sorry, younger brother of that guy from my high school history class!), and there are always some suggested friends I have never met in my life.
Of course, Facebook gives you the option to delete people out once you’re sure you never want to be Facebook friends with them, and it won’t suggest them anymore. However, I’m pretty lazy and don’t do this very often. So I’ll get a few complete strangers who show up on my homepage on a regular basis that I continue to ignore, but have probably glanced at their names enough times that I’ve memorized them. Yesterday I saw one of those regular names, and suddenly, it seemed familiar. And not just because I had seen it suggested to me a dozen times, but it felt like I actually knew the name. Girl who went to the other high school in my home town? Friend of my mom’s? College professor from a class I slept through? No, no, no. I clicked through to see her “limited” profile so I could investigate further. All I had to go on was a first and last name and a geographic network, “Northern Arizona”. This mystery person and I share no mutual friends.
Then it hit me. I don’t even know in which tiny corner of my brain I had saved this name, but I recognized it.
I bought soccer tickets from her. Over Craigslist. Two years ago.
We shared a half-dozen e-mails through my GMail account, and nothing more. We were never communicated through Facebook, or anything else. But somehow Facebook knew. Does Facebook somehow skim my e-mails? Is this some new kind of stalker tool I was unaware of? And if so, why isn’t it better at giving me targeted ads on the side of my profile page?!?*
July 1, 2009 at 6:48 pm
I wonder if it suggested her because she was face-stalking you. Either way, creepy.
January 9, 2010 at 12:40 pm
Nothing creepy or bizarre about it; when you sign up with Facebook and you provide your e-mail address, an FB spider crawls through your e-mail inbox and sent box and matches you with folks by name and by e-mail address. Facebook has recommended a number of “friends” to me who were mere e-mail acquaintances and on two ocassions they matched me with complete strangers who just happened to have the same first and last name as one of my real-world friends.